If Perk Chief Product Officer Nikita Miller is doing her job right, her work won’t ever cross users’ minds. Perk (formerly TravelPerk)’s tech focus is not on loud, client-facing products but on deploying AI invisibly across its unified travel, spend, and events platform to automate the administrative “shadow work” costing employees time and sanity. Ahead of the 2026 Skift IDEA Awards, Nikita sat down with us to talk about what is standing out to her in the travel industry today and how she uses her past to refocus her present.
Q: What trends do you think will define the next phase of business travel/travel tech or travel overall, and which ones is Perk most focused on?
Nikita: That’s a great question. The next phase for us isn’t really about travel in isolation anymore. It’s really realizing that travel spend events are all part of one ecosystem, in fact, anything that involves employee spending on behalf of their companies.
For years, businesses layered tool on top of tool, and each one created a silo and, honestly, more manual work for teams. People are done with that. At Perk, we’re being very intentional, and we’re focused on being a unified platform, where, yes, we use AI to do the bridging between this and not the human, and often what we’re seeing right now is AI makes this “shadow work” faster, but for us, it’s really about making it disappear. So that distinction is really important for us.
We’re building towards making a unified platform, and we can do that because we have a single data layer that spans travel, spend, and events. It understands you, your company’s policies, your people, your patterns. So we can be more proactive, not reactive.
Q: What is driving the next phase of growth for your team, and how is Perk positioning itself to lead in an increasingly competitive business travel and spend management landscape?
Nikita: It is increasingly competitive, but for us, our mission is a little bit deeper than that. For us, our mission is to eliminate “shadow work.” Shadow work is the hidden non-core tasks that take up employees’ time. We know that, for each employee, that shadow work is about seven hours per week. So we’re always thinking about what else might we do if we had an additional seven hours in our work week? Our architecture, our product, is built to automate this hidden shadow work that’s actually in managing travel, spend, and events so that employees and individuals get those hours back.
We’re currently running hundreds of thousands of AI compliance checks weekly. Our AI agents run thousands and thousands of calls per week, and we’re really making expenses and spend management completely touchless. And, of course, we’re not stopping there. We’re continuously looking for ways to innovate so that employees get their time back and we can add real value. —For us, that’s real human value; it’s about judgment that can drive any business forward.
Nikita: I think being new in many ways to this space, the biggest surprise was just how high the ceiling is. So much of travel spend events isn’t automated at all. So we see there’s a huge opportunity there. What’s exciting for me is that the best AI, in my opinion, goes unnoticed. And that’s the point, right? The traveler doesn’t need to think, “AI helped me.” It just works. So the hotel’s ready, because our agents make the calls ahead of time. Expenses are done in seconds, not minutes, not weeks—if you’re still using paper—and we don’t ask our users or customers to interact with AI; it just works. We interact, and we make decisions, and we’re proactive on their behalf, so the entire process should be faster, smoother and automated, so that, again, you get that time back.
Q: No AI “personalities,” just backend AI doing the task?
Nikita: Exactly. I think about this often. When you’re using a cell phone, you’re not thinking about what kind of processor it’s using. It’s just a phone, and it works. And when it works well, you’re not thinking about the technology at all. And for us, we think about solving the customer problems first, right? It’s not about the technology; it’s really about understanding who our customers are, what their needs are, and what the problems are that we can solve for them. What are the workflows that we can completely eliminate? And that, to me, is really exciting.
Q: You have led product strategy across a wide spectrum of teams. What is one lesson that has stayed with you?
Nikita: The biggest lesson, as I was mentioning before, is really about staying connected to our users, to customers, not just to the technology. The technology enables us to solve really hard, gnarly problems, but I actually began my career in customer care, and that hasn’t left me. Getting on the phone, talking to customers, understanding what their issues are not just today, but also anticipating the challenges that customers will face is what makes a lot of what we do fun. So, for us, being grounded in solving for shadow work, being really focused on what it is to be human, and adding human value and context is really important. And so it’s really great to be able to use everything at our disposal now to give time back to individuals and teams to do their best work, not manual, arduous work.
Nikita is on the panel of judges for the 2026 Skift IDEA Awards, which recognize the most innovative ideas across travel. She will be looking for ideas that not only talk a good game but actually solve a problem. Get your work in front of Nikita and the other 2026 Skift IDEA Awards judges now.
Flash sale for $100 off your entry ends on June 4 at 11:59 p.m. ET with code IDEAS26FLASH.
