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Overview
📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - Cracking the SMB Code: AI Sales That Redefine Travel Growth (AIM292)
In this video, Jane Gasparian Lee from United Airlines discusses how the company successfully cracked the SMB market through their Small Business Demand Center initiative. She explains that United had single-digit penetration with small businesses despite strong relationships with large corporations. The solution required building a four-part ecosystem: a dedicated portal, digital marketing capabilities, data-driven targeting algorithms, and a specialized team. Key success factors included consistent internal storytelling, launching incrementally rather than waiting for perfection, and focusing on high-yield incremental revenue as the core metric. Jane emphasizes hiring the right leader comfortable with ambiguity, learning from real customer behavior, and adapting offerings—like adding a rewards-based program alongside discounts. Future plans include implementing next-best-action algorithms and improving generative AI chatbot capabilities to scale efficiently with a lean team of two servicing 10,000 customers.
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Main Part
Identifying the SMB Opportunity: United Airlines' Journey Begins
Thank you everyone for joining. I'm very excited to talk about the topic we have today, which is about cracking the SMB code and how United Airlines has very successfully been able to do that. As we have our introduction, my name is Kunal. I'm a Managing Principal at ZS and I help lead our Travel and Hospitality practice. Who better to talk about this topic than with the person who leads B2B Marketing and International Marketing at United? Jane, would you like to share a quick introduction?
Sure, thanks Kunal. Great to be here. My fun fact is this is my second time in Venice this week. I actually was fortunate enough to be in the real Venice earlier this week and just got back on Friday, so I'm hopping all over time zones. My name is Jane Gasparian Lee. I've been with United for about six years. I lead the B2B marketing team, as Kunal said, and I have the pleasure of launching this brand new capability to address the SMB potential. I'm really excited to chat with you all today.
Thank you again for joining us for the session. Jane, let's start all the way at the beginning. Small and medium business is, of course, a very attractive segment. What did you guys see at United that highlighted the opportunity or the challenges you were facing? How did you embark on this journey? Where did it start?
It actually started almost on my very first day at United Airlines six years ago in 2019, and it was work that you guys were kicking off. One of the things I was asked to do was give the entire landscape of the business travel and travel market in the US and help understand where we have opportunities. The number one opportunity, of course, was the SMB space. What we saw is that we had really deep and long-standing relationships with some of the world's largest organizations, but we had essentially single-digit penetration with small businesses. As we dug into that, we realized it's because we didn't have a capability to serve them profitably. That's really where it started—very simply looking at the landscape and identifying a white space where we had really low penetration.
Building an Ecosystem: The Four Pillars of the Small Business Demand Center
As you were speaking, I was just looking out at folks and you see a few nods here too. I don't think it's uncommon among any industries to target and acquire small and medium-sized businesses. It's very hard to go after with traditional sales forces because the ROI is just not there. But now with innovation in B2B marketing and more technology broadly, we can actually do this efficiently and effectively. As you embarked on that journey, can you talk a little bit about how you used some of what's available now to win some of these customers?
Absolutely. As we went to build the story of how we wanted to go after this opportunity, one of the questions we knew we had to answer is what are we going to do differently this time? It wasn't the first time that United tried to go after this opportunity. In fact, we joked around at the time that we still have United Business Go as a registered trademark from the last time we had tried it. It wasn't even that long ago that we had failed, and our competitors had also failed. So the question we really asked ourselves was what are we going to do differently this time?
As I was building the story, I realized it had to be this idea that it's not a technology—it's an ecosystem that we had to build. That ecosystem is really around four parts. The first part is the site itself, a place for SMB customers to go to sign up for their program. The second piece was the digital marketing capability to drive them to the site and actually get them to sign up and engage. The third piece was the data that was going to allow us to build our target list, build our segmentations off of those target lists, and actually attract them through the digital marketing capability.
Finally, it was the team. We needed to actually have a team to orchestrate all this. It wasn't just building a portal or building some sort of system and pushing it out. It really had to be a full ecosystem of those four components. That's what I've been preaching since that day—it has to be all of those four elements together in order to build the right foundation to scale this in the long term.
It's a great point. For those of you who may not be as familiar with the travel industry, especially on the B2B side and corporate travel side more broadly, there are sort of two buyers. There's the buyer we call a corporate travel manager, the ones who decide to sign up for a program with United or any other company. For a small business, this could be a CEO, a CFO, a head of procurement, or even a designated travel manager. But then there's also the second piece, which is the people who actually travel—the end travelers, all of us.
The way we characterize it is you have to get on the shelf and then you have to get picked off the shelf. To win both those pieces, as Jane said, you have to win in B2B marketing and you have to win in B2C marketing because you need the end travelers to pick you. You have to have a dashboard that allows you to manage the program and a dot com capability where you go to united.com and want all your fares to seamlessly appear for you, with your corporate rates pulling through and so on.
Of course, technology is a big element. Jane talked a little bit about people and process, and we'll talk about that in a second. But Jane, can you talk a little bit more about the technology because United has done such good work in enabling this and allowing for the seamless experience and connecting all of these four pieces?
Thank you. Let me unpack that a bit because I think you've said a lot of important things there. It's helpful to understand our ecosystem and both the travel manager and the traveler we're working with. But as advice to all of you, I'm sure not all of you are in the travel industry. I think the key piece of advice is to think through those layers of influence and understand when you need to unlock that influencer and with what particular message. That's exactly what we did in our case.
When we're talking to the travel manager, we're talking about savings that they can deliver for their company, which may not necessarily be the most relevant message to the traveler. But to the travel manager, that's what's important. Some of the reporting tools we offer on our portal are important to them. So we attract them with the right messaging to influence them to click that button to get into the program. But the journey doesn't end there, as Kunal said. There's that second layer of influencer—the traveler actually has to still book the trip and put that into their cart.
That's where the technology piece was really important. We wanted that to be super simple. Essentially, you just link your work email address to your business account and your discount shows up automatically in your app. We wanted to leverage the existing B2C and traveler ecosystem that already exists at United. They book the exact same way they've always booked. They just click a business travel button versus the personal travel button.
We do have amazing technology. If you guys are not United flyers, we have the number one app out there, so I highly recommend flying United and downloading the app if you haven't. It's truly amazing and world class. As a traveler, we're not trying to reinvent the wheel for you, but you get those discounts and access to all of that program through the tools and channels you already are using.
Lessons from Implementation: Storytelling, Patience, and the Right Team
So, as you talked about technology, take us behind the scenes in terms of maybe some of those kinks or challenges you might have run into, or some of the key success factors you were thinking of executing on this technology. What were some of those learnings that you had? In my opinion, you went through this process in probably the most patient and best in class way, but maybe you can share a little bit more with the audience in terms of some of those things that don't make the newsreel.
Absolutely, there's a lot of lessons there. I'm sure there are some things I'll share with you that aren't going to be super surprising, but it's amazing how you can lose sight of it. Number one is it goes back to telling that story. We built an airtight story and we told it over and over and over again. I cannot tell you the number of times I've presented the same slides at different layers of the organization. I know it's not ideal, but obviously you're working in a giant company with a lot of moving parts. It's just about being consistent in the storytelling at all levels and at different parts of the organization.
By the time we got that funding approved, everyone was bought in—from the development team that was building the technology to the finance team that was funding the technology to the sales team that was going to implement this technology. Everyone knew what it was. A slight nuance to this that I was actually reflecting on recently is that we internally branded this thing. I wasn't necessarily thinking that's what we were doing, but I realized that was a key factor in our success. We called it the Small Business Demand Center. We gave it a name that was very clear and very definitive of what it was.
It was meant to be an internal name to help define this new capability. Every time I talked about it, I talked about it not as a technology or a platform, but as this new capability. I think that was another key factor in the success.
Once we got the funding, we kept telling that story and we continue to tell the story of that success. I would say the second factor is don't wait for all the pieces to be perfectly in place to start. We had to start somewhere. We had really grand visions of building ML algorithms that were going to help us target and segment customers and decide the next best action, but the reality is we weren't going to build all of them and then start. We had to start somewhere.
The portal was going to have all this functionality, but to be perfectly honest, we're two years into the launch and we're still building out that functionality. We had to start somewhere, and we're slowly scaling, slowly optimizing, and slowly tweaking. The beauty of that approach is we now have an installed user base of real customers that are providing real-time feedback. We're not training our algorithms on hypothetical data that we bought from a third party. We're training it based on what's actually happening and what our customers are actually doing.
We've had some learnings, and I'll talk about it in our closing and some of our improvements. We learned that when we went out with three options, well, guess what? Ninety percent of our customers are choosing one of those options. Clearly, we weren't as differentiated or distinctive in those options as we thought we were. Still, I'm so happy to be learning live and have the ability to adapt because it's also giving us the credibility to ask for more funding and additional investment. We can say that we're bringing high quality incremental revenue, not just in our hubs but from our spokes as well.
One of the things that stood out to me personally, being a small part of this journey with you, was the patience. This is not a week-long exercise or a month-long exercise or even a few months. It took a lot of fine tuning of these algorithms and targeting to actually work. There were some pockets of success, but then you kept staying the course. Leadership and cross-functional alignment and commitment to the cause were key aspects. In reality, that was important because everyone believed in the outcome and said, let's stay the course and stick with it.
My other piece of advice here is be really clear on ultimately what metric you're measuring. We did go out and say to finance, give us X amount of dollars and we're going to give you one hundred million dollars. At the end of the day, we did not deliver on our year one number, and we had to go in front of finance and explain the conversation. It was actually one of the best meetings I've ever had because we went into that meeting saying we did not hit our objectives, but what really matters is not the revenue flowing through and not the number of accounts we've signed up.
What matters is the fact that these are incremental customers that are what we call in our business high yield, which means they paid a lot of money for the plane ticket. We focused on that metric of bringing in high yield incremental revenue into the system. That definitely still more than paid back the investment that we made. We didn't hit our goal in terms of the number of accounts and we didn't hit our goal in terms of overall revenue, but ultimately what finance cares about is high quality incremental revenue, and we got that.
Of course, technology is obviously the cornerstone of what happened here, but I don't think it would be fair to say that this was only a technology effort. From our lens, the team that you had in place, the operating model of how you worked with technology, revenue management, and other functions—there was much more than just the technology. Can you talk a little bit about some of those other enabling factors for success?
Absolutely. In fact, one of the elements of the funding that we asked for was a project we did with you to help us build the team, write the job descriptions, and write an operating model of how this team was going to work within the broader organization. We still obviously have fruit from that, so that was a really important part of it. It wasn't just that we got this head count and then we're done. We really had to think about how this new team works within the existing structure and what those SOPs are that we're all aligned to.
The other thing I would say is that it's really important to hire the right person to lead that team. There is a very specific skill set when you're launching something brand new. That person has to be collaborative. They also have to be really comfortable working in gray areas. In general, I think that's the number one thing I evaluate these days—are you able to work in gray areas because there's no more black and white in this world. That was really important, and someone who has an insane amount of ownership, someone who's going to break down barriers and make it happen because it's really challenging, especially when you start.
So that would be my other tip if you're building out a new capability like this to address SMB potential: be really thoughtful of who you put at the helm of that kind of organization. She is great, and I do think overall ownership of this program is critical. You talked a little bit about SBDC and the branding, but one of the things I've heard you say is that it's not just a technology, it's a capability. It feels like this is one of those things where all the pieces have to work together for it to really work well.
What's Next: Evolving Products, Algorithms, and Generative AI Capabilities
We have a few more minutes, so maybe if we can close with what's next. SBDC is of course yielding tremendous value to United and targeting the right customers. It's taken time, but you're hitting your stride now. I don't think we can walk past a booth here without talking about agentic AI or some of the innovations that are on the horizon. Can you share a little bit about where SBDC goes from here?
I can mention three things that we're continuing to tweak on. I already touched on a couple of them, but I'll expand on it. Number one, we did learn that the products we put out in front of our customers met one segment of the opportunity but missed a pretty big one. We spent a lot of time trying to address that. We've essentially satisfied the people who are just wanting straight discounts on their tickets. They don't care about anything else. They're just trying to hit the bottom line for their company. We have a plan for that that's been really successful. That's the one that 90 percent of our customers are signing up for.
But there's a segment of customers we're learning that are really into the experience and into the freebies. They want to be earning the freebies and the points that they can redeem for free things. That was not something we had the technology to build into the portal initially. We had a feeling that was going to be the case because we clearly understand our customers well, but we also knew that technology-wise we weren't going to be able to launch in time. So we chose to launch with a discount-only program. We had a pretty good sense that we were going to have to do this follow-up work, and that's exactly what we're doing. We just announced that we're going to launch that phase of the plan mid-next year where customers will be able to sign up and they don't receive discounts but they slowly earn benefits and rewards as they travel with United.
The other piece we talked about is that the algorithms continue to be built out. We're now getting to a phase where it's learning from actual customer behavior, which is really exciting versus hypothetical data that we're buying from a third party. The next algorithm we're working on is the next best action algorithm, which is essentially going to recommend a marketing action to the digital marketing team for a lead that's coming into the platform based on where they're coming from and what they've engaged with from a content standpoint to date and what we know from past customers in terms of what was most likely to drive conversion. That algorithm is incredibly important and is the final algorithm of what ZS had proposed to us at that time, and we are in the process of building it.
Finally, we have to talk about generative AI and chatbots. We did introduce a chatbot to the platform. To be honest, we only have two individuals servicing these 10,000 customers that are coming into our portal, so the chatbot just makes that more efficient. But the chatbot is only as good as the information we've put in it. It's not generative. It's not very smart. We are noticing that things are escalating to human quite often. If we want to continue to scale, we're going to have to improve the generative abilities of that chatbot to address more of the questions that are coming in so we can continue to scale with the size of the team that we currently have.
Those are three key initiatives we're working on for 2026. The biggest takeaway for me was the fact that you invested in laying the right foundation but realized that this wouldn't yield value right off the bat. Then continuing to stay the course with leadership investments and all of that, and now hitting stride. That's a really inspiring story.
My advice would just be to tell your story. Be really clear and tight on what your story is. Tell your story over and over again and be really focused in your story on the metrics that matter to your broader organization.
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