Amex GBT sells trust, and builds its AI governance on it

Amex GBT is a software, payments and meetings company for business travel. Its chief privacy officer told Skift that the company sells trust above all, and that its entire AI governance framework is built around that idea. In practice, that means every AI deployment gets reviewed through the lens of what a corporate client would tolerate losing: data, compliance, predictability.

That framing matters for hotels. You are deploying AI in revenue management, guest messaging, upsell engines and PMS automations, often with vendors who promise magic and show you a dashboard. The trust question is the same one Amex GBT is answering: what happens when the model is wrong, who sees the guest data, and can you explain the decision to a client or a regulator.

My read: most hotel tech vendors still pitch AI as a feature, not as a governance commitment. The ones who start selling auditability, data residency and model transparency as part of the product will win the mid-market and enterprise accounts. Hoteliers buying AI should ask the same questions Amex GBT asks itself, in writing, before signing.