Cognizant deploys Anthropic’s Claude AI to modernise Travelport’s travel platform

Indian IT firm Cognizant is deploying Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant to help modernise the technology infrastructure of travel technology company Travelport, as enterprises increasingly adopt generative AI tools to accelerate software development and automate operations.

The collaboration will initially focus on Travelport’s booking and servicing platform, including systems handling bookings, exchanges, refunds and disruption management. The companies said the partnership is aimed at helping Travelport embed AI-driven capabilities into its platform while speeding up software delivery cycles.

Under the arrangement, Cognizant will use Claude for software engineering tasks such as code development, testing and analysing Travelport’s existing codebases. The companies said the move is expected to reduce the time required to build and deploy new software features for clients.

Travelport said the collaboration would accelerate its ability to roll out AI-led innovation for travel management companies, airlines and hotels.

In a statement, Travelport chief executive officer John Mangelaars described the partnership as “a genuine AI superpower” for the company.

“Anthropic brings the most capable AI models and tools,” Mangelaars said. “Cognizant adds engineering talent and development capability to deploy them at scale, and Travelport brings the travel infrastructure and the partner network that connects it all to the real world of distribution and bookings.”

The first customer-facing AI capabilities are expected to be introduced later this year. These will include automated exchange systems, disruption intelligence and workflow automation tools aimed at reducing manual workloads for travel agents.

For travel management companies, Travelport said the platform could eventually help agents identify travel routes with lower disruption risks while automating parts of the booking and servicing process.

The partnership highlights how global enterprises are increasingly deploying generative AI models beyond chatbots and copilots into core operational systems and software engineering workflows. AI coding assistants are rapidly emerging as a key enterprise use case, with technology services firms integrating large language models into software development, testing and maintenance operations.

“The travel industry runs on some of the most complex technology infrastructure in the world, and the companies that will lead it forward are the ones investing now in how that infrastructure gets built,” Cognizant chief executive Ravi Kumar said.

“This collaboration is about giving Travelport the tools to move faster and deliver higher quality at scale to meet the challenge of a changing travel distribution landscape,” he added.

The announcement also underscores growing enterprise adoption of Anthropic’s Claude models as businesses seek alternatives to OpenAI and Google-backed AI ecosystems for enterprise-scale deployments.