Navan went public recently (Oct 2025) and is disrupting the corporate travel & expense space using agentic AI.
Right now, I'm leading “Navan Anywhere”- building our agentic travel system and embedding it into any LLM of choice our enterprise buyers prefer. It’s fast growing and we are driving enterprise agentic change.
Before this, I ran the core product ($3B+ GBV) with margin accountability that led to IPO readiness. Travel is heavily manual and we've been using AI to automate at unprecedented levels driving strong margins.
This is a fun space as the business model is beautifully complex- operating as a B2B2C with marketplace revenue and a subscription model. We create value for 4 cohorts- users, companies, partners & suppliers- and we do this with a very lean team so ruthless focus is a core ethic.
Over the last 12+ years, my focus has been on running products with true P&L accountability and close GTM alignment. I genuinely enjoy partnering with Sales and Account Management to jump on calls, win enterprise deals, and make sure our renewals stay strong.
I enjoy paying it forward by sharing what I've learned about product strategy, business models, and behavioral science through writing and speaking. (Though if you want to trace my roots, I'm a Harvard MBA and a BCG-trained strategist who just really loves building things that work).
Charanya Kannan has been a guest on 1 episode.
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Your AI Doesn't Have a Feature Problem. It Has an Adoption Problem. | Charanya Kannan (Navan)
September 29th, 2026 | Season 2 | 29 mins 16 secs
business, digital experience, product management, technology
Every product team is shipping AI. But the dirty secret is that, for many companies, very few users are adopting. The feature launches, the people who try it love it, and adoption stalls anyway.
Our guest today thinks that's because teams obsess over building AI and barely think about adoption. Charanya Kannan is VP and GM of Navan Anywhere, which puts Navan's AI travel and expense tools inside Slack, Teams, and Gemini, where people already work, instead of asking them to open another app.
She joined Navan when the company was still called TripActions and doing under $50 million in revenue... now it's well on its way to a billion.
Her take: if customers have to work harder to use your AI, it isn't actually better.
In this episode, Charanya shares:
- How Navan Anywhere was built distribution-first, bringing booking and expenses into the tools people already use every day
- Why Navan's margins went up in the AI era, while the rest of SaaS braces for compression
- And why she believes PMs who mostly manage process and Jira tickets will fade away, while those who can actually drive user benefit and business outcomes will matter more than ever