Travel Approval Moves Toward Agent-Based Unmanned Operations

On October 10, 2026, TravelDaily China published an article discussing the evolution direction of travel approval, proposing that travel approval is evolving from manual review of each order to the Agent era, with manual intervention required only for exceptions, and approval actions moving forward to the implementation stage to set administrative and budget control boundaries; the article divides the approval system into three control lines: business, administrative, and budget, considers budget control to have the highest priority, and states that Agents can simultaneously obtain authorization from the three types of responsible persons and run multiple processes in parallel. On October 11, the media outlet published another article discussing the relationship between expense control and TMC in the Agent era, proposing that in the fourth-generation approval structure the entry point becomes an Agent natural dialogue entry, expense control agents and TMC agents operate in parallel and are simultaneously invoked by an orchestration layer, and the attribution of administrative control is no longer a one-time selection; the article holds that expense control engines are designed for all-category procurement and can only perform compliance verification, while TMCs possess real-time inventory, enterprise-exclusive closed-loop data, and offline fulfillment, can generate optimal solutions and make reasonableness judgments, and provides two yardsticks for the AI transformation of TMC services—input compression degree and decision convergence degree—pointing out that TMCs need to open solution services to client enterprises' orchestration layers.