How Zuora Uses AI with Navan to Transform Travel and Expense

Region

APAC: Asia-Pacific, EMEA: Europe, Middle East, and Africa, NORAM: North America

Headquarters

Redwood City, California

Company Size

Mid-Market (800-2,500 employees)

Industry

Tech

Products Used

• Navan Business Travel
• Navan Expense
• Navan Travel Payments
• Navan Corporate Cards

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Zuora provides a leading monetization platform that enables businesses to build, run, and grow through a mix of usage-based models, subscription bundles, and more. From pricing and packaging to billing, payments, and revenue recognition, Zuora’s flexible software solutions help companies scale with demand. Headquartered in Silicon Valley with a global presence across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, Zuora empowers organizations to modernize their monetization strategies.

At the helm of Zuora’s corporate operations and IT strategy is Karthik Chakkarapani, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. His primary focus is driving growth, improving efficiency, and ensuring a seamless employee experience across the organization. In pursuit of these goals, Zuora sought to enhance its travel and expense (T&E) management, leading to its adoption of Navan.

Before Navan

Before implementing Navan, Zuora faced significant challenges with its previous travel and expense solution. Less than half of the employees used the previous tool for travel bookings and expense reimbursements; the majority relied on manual, paper-based processes. Nothing was automated, which led to inefficiencies across the company.

Finance teams, for example, spent a solid portion of time manually processing expenses, approving reimbursements, and ensuring compliance. And employees, who were required to use personal credit cards to pay for travel costs, often had to wait several weeks for reimbursement. Overall, the system’s lack of automation, transparency, and efficiency created operational bottlenecks and detracted from Zuora’s goal of providing a seamless employee experience.

“

Our launch was a significant, unified event across 17 countries, made possible by Navan’s consolidated and flexible policy adoption platform.

June Park

Principal Business Systems Analyst, Zuora

Why Navan

Zuora conducted a thorough evaluation of travel and expense solutions before selecting Navan. The decision was driven by four key factors:

• Navan provided an intuitive and seamless employee experience, which aligned with Zuora’s priority of enhancing internal operations.
• The solution offered cost savings through a robust inventory with low prices, while polices embedded directly into the program helped ensure compliance and cost control. 
• With real-time visibility into expenses, Zuora could manage budgets proactively and effectively.
• Navan’s ability to standardize processes across Zuora’s global operations allowed the company to drive efficiency and automation at scale. 

“Our launch was a significant, unified event across 17 countries, made possible by Navan’s consolidated and flexible policy adoption platform,” said June Park, Principal Business Systems Analyst at Zuora. “And the intuitive, easy-to-use configuration facilitated a seamless transition.”

“

If I have to describe Navan in a few words, it's AI for travel and expense.

Karthik Chakkarapani

Senior Vice President and CIO, Zuora

AI- Powered Transformation with Navan

Zuora has been at the forefront of AI adoption, leveraging AI-driven automation across multiple areas of its business. When the company implemented Navan, it saw an opportunity to enhance its travel and expense management through AI. “If I have to describe Navan in a few words, it’s AI for travel and expense,” said Chakkarapani.

Navan uses AI-powered search to recommend flights and hotels based on employee profiles, locations, and corporate policies — eliminating the need for time-consuming manual searches. Navan also transformed expense management at Zuora, with AI automatically coding expenses, applying policy-based auto-approvals, and only flagging outliers for finance team review. 

“When submitting expenses, I could see everything automatically populate — all I had to do was enter a business reason, and then boom, I hit the submit button. It’s a very quick way of submitting expenses,” explained Karthik. 

Zuora has also seen measurable time savings across the organization. According to Eric Phillips, Senior Program Manager, employees have experienced approximately a 15% reduction in time spent entering business travel expenses. Managers have benefited even more, with automatic approvals saving nearly 60% of their time.

Future with Navan

Zuora’s current partnership with Navan is just the beginning. The company is eager to explore deeper AI integrations, particularly in enabling bot-to-bot communication between the two AI-powered assistants. “Navan is doing great things,” said Chakkarapani, “so we want to learn and partner with them to see how we can bring some of those valued capabilities to Zuora.” 

Zuora is excited for these collaborations with Navan on AI-driven innovations in travel and expense management. “Navan has been one of the fastest and smoothest implementations I’ve seen,” said Chakkarapani. “Now, we want to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and automation.” 

As Navan continues to expand its AI capabilities, Zuora is poised to leverage these advancements and further enhance its efficiency and employee experience.