What do you do when the biggest threat to your business isn't a competitor, but the next version of your own product?
In this episode of The CMO Show, Mark Jones sits down with Nick Whitehead, CMO of Serko, the travel technology company powering booking experiences for some of the world's largest travel brands like Booking.com. Nick joins us to explore the bold decision to launch a new AI-powered platform designed to make the company's existing products redundant. Rather than protecting the status quo, Serko has embraced a philosophy of self-disruption, rebuilding its offering from the ground up to create an AI-native travel assistant that fundamentally reimagines how business travel is managed.
Nick shares the strategic, commercial and cultural challenges that come with reinventing a successful business. From redefining product categories and educating an emerging market, to navigating partner relationships while introducing a direct-to-customer model, he reveals what it takes to bring a transformational product to market. Along the way, the conversation explores the evolving role of the CMO as orchestrator, the importance of customer insight in an AI era, and why marketers need the courage to challenge their own business models before someone else does.
For marketers navigating disruption, innovation and AI-driven change, this episode offers a powerful lesson: sometimes the smartest growth strategy is being willing to replace what made you successful in the first place.
####
This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Niall Hughes, Kirsten Bables, Syd Le, and audio engineer Ed Cheng. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
####
Mark Jones
What's the future of the CMO? It's a vexed question. We love talking about it, and of course, in the AI era, everything is changing. The big question comes down to this: how well can you work with not just your peers, but the entire organisation?
Hello, and welcome to The CMO Show. Mark Jones is my name. Thank you for joining us. The CMO Show is a podcast brought to you by Impact Institute in partnership with Adobe. Today, my guest is Nick Whitehead. He's the CMO at Serko, which is an online technology platform in the travel sector. And this is a fascinating example of a company that's looking at just how fast travel is changing. And instead of waiting for the waves of change to wash through it, it's actually really embracing change for itself and reinventing its entire business. So Nick and I look at the new AI-based product that they're rolling out in the United States. We look at his mindset, the approach that he brings to his job, and what it means from a marketing point of view. What does it mean for the future of marketers and what they need to be thinking about? It's a really great conversation. Let's get into it.
Nick, thanks for joining me. Now, let's get straight into it. What is Serko?
Nick Whitehead
So Serko is actually spelt S-E-R-K-O, unlike the other spelling of Serco, which is in a slightly different business. We're not in jails, we're in jets. It is a challenge in Australia, where Serco with a C have been running prisons and things like that for a long time. Very different business. So we're in jets, not jails. We're an e-commerce platform for business travel. So if you've booked a work trip through Flight Centre or Corporate Traveller or even through Booking.com for Business, then you've probably used Serko's products to book that flight, that hotel, your rental car, all of that.
Mark Jones
So you're a B2B2C if you wanna go there, is that right?
Nick Whitehead
Yeah, we are. I think you could say that. We have all the mixes of Bs and Cs somewhere in our business models. Globally, last year, about eight million business trips were booked on our platform in about 150 different countries, and there are a couple of different models that we take in terms of a go-to-market.
Mark Jones
You're also pretty active in the New Zealand marketing community. You and I know each other from the iMedia Future of Marketing events as well. If I could just stay there for a tick before we get back into the business, what's the vibe in New Zealand at the moment in terms of the marketing community?
Nick Whitehead
Mark, it is on fire. The number of successful technology companies that are coming out of New Zealand at the moment is incredible. It's like a conveyor belt of incredible success stories coming out in all sorts of different industries — from MarTech with the likes of Tracksuit, Ideally, other companies coming out of there, and in the agritech space. The two leading companies in virtual fencing in the world have both come from New Zealand, from within about 150 kilometres of each other. That's Gallagher and Halter. Virtual fencing — the operating systems for farms worldwide are kind of being developed here at the moment. So there are some incredible success stories coming out of New Zealand, and from a marketing perspective, the community has actually never been stronger. It's a great place to be. And when I say the community, those are marketers who are part of really great success stories who live and work here, but we're very focused on global markets, which is really exciting. In Serko's example, we're a New Zealand-headquartered company, but something like 99% of our revenue comes from international markets, not from New Zealand. And that's consistently the case.
Mark Jones
What do you think's driving that? What's the macroeconomic or otherwise — what's going on?
Nick Whitehead
I think the ecosystem has just matured here in a way that is much more supportive than it was probably 10 or 15 years ago. By that, I mean things like access to capital, access to global talent who have returned to New Zealand. The appeal of getting into the tech and startup space has never been stronger, so there's some great young blood coming into the space as well. And then there's a more and more established track record of companies who have walked this path really successfully, and we're starting to get our act together in terms of supporting each other on the journey across the Pacific and into the US market and beyond, rather than individually all trying to get out there and fight our way through that jungle. We're starting to learn that there's actually a path we can follow through it.
Mark Jones
Sounds awesome. And there's even some billionaires building bunkers in the South Island too, so there's a whole other side market.
Nick Whitehead
Well, some of them are building bunkers, but some of them are making incredibly good pinot noir as well, so there are pluses and minuses.
Mark Jones
Glad to hear it. Well, back to Serko and the Booking.coms and the Flight Centres and so on — there's obviously a very strong set of really key relationships. When you think about your marketing strategy, can you just give us a picture of what's involved? Because obviously you've got a few people you've just got to keep happy all the time, right? But then how are you thinking more broadly?
Nick Whitehead
Yeah. Well, we have to keep them happy, but we also have to be mutually commercially successful. One thing that Serko's done really exceptionally well is prove the viability of a partner-led distribution model for tech companies. In the enterprise space, we've partnered with the likes of Flight Centre and Corporate Traveller and other travel management companies, and they effectively resell our technology into their large market customers. So we have something like 7,000 enterprise customers around the world, including some of the biggest tech companies on the planet, some US federal government departments, and Australian state government. Those customers have effectively been acquired, onboarded, and retained by our partners. In the SMB space, we've partnered with Booking.com in a joint venture called Booking.com for Business, which is again effectively our technology with our partner's brand on it. So we've been able to achieve reach and scale through those partnerships in a way that we really could not have done so quickly off our own brand and off our own bat. That partner-led growth model has been really successful for us. We've grown our revenue about 550% over the last five years, and we've done it with a sales and marketing investment that's about 80% less than the kind of standard SaaS industry benchmarks.
Mark Jones
Okay. So —
Nick Whitehead
Now, from a marketing perspective, that does have a few nuances and challenges, though.
Mark Jones
I was just about to go there. Why don't you speak to that?
Nick Whitehead
Yeah. So the challenge is, when you are working through a partner as a distribution model, you've got a little bit of distance from them, so your acquisition marketing costs are lower. But you also have a little bit more distance from the customer or from the market. What we learned was that in a partner-led model, you have to be really, really strong at partner enablement and product marketing. The epiphany for me was that your value proposition is only as strong as your partner's ability to articulate it in market.
The lightning moment for me was a few years ago when we rolled out a new product into the Australian market called Zeno. The idea was that this was an amazing new product that would effectively replace our incumbent technology called Serko Online, which was a really old technology but well-liked. So we went out and spoke to all our partners about this new amazing product called Zeno. We took them through an incredible presentation. Our partner development team spent a lot of time talking to these reps about it, and we said, "Go for it. Go sell Zeno and let us know how you get on." Then about a month later, we checked in with them and said, "How are the sales going?"
And they said, "Oh yeah, Zeno — yeah, it's great. People love it. Really keen. They just don't wanna buy it." And it forced us to really look at why that was. At the core of it was that they just couldn't quite articulate the value proposition in a way that the customer understood it. They couldn't identify the customer pain points and align the benefits of the product and how it married up to that, so they couldn't really paint a very clear business case around what the upside was to go through the pain of change to this product that incidentally cost a bit more than the legacy product. So we went back to base and built a partner enablement program around Zeno. We built effectively a learn-to-sell program, or a licence-to-sell program, called Get Your Wings. We did it like a flight school where you eventually built your way up to flying solo, and we gave them their Zeno wings. We even turned that into an accreditation that partners would put on their LinkedIn profile. And we saw a massive transformation in the partner's ability to sell and onboard customers onto Zeno, to the point where we were able to effectively 100% displace our legacy product. But yeah, it was that epiphany — it doesn't matter how good the product is, and it doesn't matter how good our marketing messaging is. If the partners haven't got to the point where they can articulate it themselves, then we're not set up for success. So that was a really big learning.
Mark Jones
You're CMO, but you're actually talking about productising effectively a sales training tool.
Nick Whitehead
Yes. Well, it's a different model, right? When it's about partner distribution, it's all about partner enablement and partner marketing, and so the investments that we made were more in effectively building marketing engines for our partners, not to the end customer.
Mark Jones
We've touched on Zeno. You've got some other products too, right? And you're getting into the AI space?
Nick Whitehead
Yeah. You and I caught up a little while ago about this when we were in the build phase. We've now launched a new product called Serko AI. The idea behind this was that we would launch the product that would make all of our existing products obsolete. So — try and kill our business before anybody else does. Just this month we've launched into the US market only, so I'm sorry to any Aussie listeners, you can't use it just yet, but we'll get there soon enough. And it's been quite a transformation for us in a number of different ways. One is the customers that we're going after, the problems that we're solving, the product that we've delivered, how we build that product, and how we take that product to market, and even how we commercialise it. Every single aspect of that has been through a transformation.
Mark Jones
All right. So what does it do?
Nick Whitehead
Good question. With all of our existing products, they're really good at getting you to — or helping you to search from — needing to fly from somewhere to somewhere else on certain dates. Once you've booked that trip, that flight, hotel, whatever, effectively the use of our technology is pretty much done at that point, and you're on your way. Traditional booking tool.
The new product, Serko AI, is effectively a personal travel agent or a personal travel assistant. It gets to know you, gets to know your preferences, can understand your calendar, can understand the intent of your trip. So that whole search process changes quite dramatically because it's incredibly personalised to you. Some people refer to it as what it would've been like back in the '70s or '80s when you had an executive assistant who knew exactly the airline you wanted to fly, that you wanted a window seat, that you like to stay in a particular part of town, that you always wanted to have a gym, that you needed to be within walking distance of the meeting — all those kinds of things. That's what Serko AI gets to know about you.
But what's really cool is where we used to finish the job at the trip being booked, that's actually when a lot of the smarts now really kick into gear. What we're working towards is that from that point on, the technology will be continually re-shopping to see if that seat or that room becomes available at a cheaper rate, and then letting you know so you can be confident that you're always getting the lowest rate. And then 24 hours before your trip starts, the agents start scanning for anything that would disrupt your travel. So it's looking at airline operations, airport operations, weather events — and this is particularly relevant in the US where often you're routing through different hubs. So it's letting you know of any disruptions that might happen before they happen. And what we're working towards is that it will proactively manage that disruption for you by holding you seats on other flights, helping you figure out what else you could book to get you there in time, all the way through to eventually you get back home with all of the receipts and expenses from your trip packaged up ready for you. So the idea is that it's with you through the whole trip, and it's in your corner the whole way.
Mark Jones
I think in this context when we think about the role of marketing — how are you approaching this? Because it sounds a bit like product marketing really. You've got to make sure that the benefits and features are clearly understood, there's a story to be told, simplifying a very complex message, knowing exactly what's going to get these B2B buyers over the line — all that sort of stuff, right? Is that where most of your effort's gone, or something else?
Nick Whitehead
Yeah. A couple of things. One is we started about a year ago actually trying to educate the market so that when we got ready to launch a product, they would even be able to comprehend it and be able to ask the right kind of questions to assess whether it's the right kind of offering for them. So going back a year ago, we rolled out an AI for travel managers course, which was an online e-learning program designed to introduce the concept of generative AI, and in particular in their context. So things like prompt engineering for travel managers that could run hotel RFPs using LLMs, that type of thing. And then earlier this year, we rolled out an agentic AI for travel managers program — a level two — that again helped them understand what we mean when we talk about agents, or when we talk about agentic commerce or multi-agent workflows. So given how new this whole area is, we had to invest in warming up the market so they even understood what it was when we were ready to talk to them about it. And we whetted their appetite for some of the upside and the transformation that we think it can bring to their world. But we didn't start from a position of selling or marketing to them. It was from a position of education, thought leadership, and helping them move there.
And now we're at a point of category definition. A number of the things that we're able to bring to market with Serko AI are quite mind-blowing, and people struggle to get their head around it. So yeah, there is a lot of work that's going to go into educating the audience. Obviously there are some who from day one are like, "You're going to AI my business travel? Hell yeah, I want in on that." And there's a whole load of people who are like, "What does that even mean?" And as you say, there's a big trust barrier to overcome there.
Our research showed us that more than 80% of US business travellers would like an agentic AI travel assistant. But if you look at the willingness to allow agents to purchase on your behalf, that figure's in the single digits. And I think you can probably relate to that. Many people listening to this will have researched a trip on ChatGPT or whatever their LLM is, but when it comes time to actually booking that hotel or booking that flight, they've generally gone back to qantas.com or Expedia or Booking.com.
Mark Jones
The question's got to be asked — what happens to traditional travel agents? Are you bringing them very intentionally into all of this through the training?
Nick Whitehead
The death of the travel agency has been forecast many times in the past and hasn't yet come to fruition. So we're not really making a bet either way on that. In fact, we are working with travel management companies and continuing to test them as a distribution channel. At launch we are going live with one travel management company in the US. We're going to test how that works. But it is different — it's a different way of doing things, and it's different commercial models to what's gone before. So we're going to try it out and see how that works.
Mark Jones
Yeah, great. And you mentioned defining the category. What's the category we're talking about here?
Nick Whitehead
Good question. The category we came out of was called an online booking tool. But that doesn't really work so well when there's so much more than just the booking, right? When it's an entire end-to-end travel management offering, or a travel agent in your pocket. And "online" has kind of fallen by the wayside as well, where now you can interact through the browser, Slack, text, chat — whatever you want, talk to it. So a personal travel assistant, or personal travel agent, is kind of where we're at the moment.
Mark Jones
Personal travel agent. What if — I imagine this is what's going to happen next — what if your personal travel agent starts speaking with the Claude-coded or Vibe-coded personal travel agent created by the customer? Because that's becoming very much a standard approach beyond just LLMs, with people really getting into building out their own agentic workflows, either personally or in their business. I know we're starting to get pretty technical here, but there's a level of sophistication that's going to be required to make this work.
Nick Whitehead
Yeah, there is. We've spoken a lot about the traveller experience that we've built, but the flip side of the coin is we've focused on building a really phenomenal company experience. That's designed for companies to be able to understand what is going on with their travellers, what's going on with their travel spend, and how they can optimise that. We've done a lot of work to eliminate any kind of administrative burden, and we've even been able to eliminate approvals, which is quite cool.
In a lot of organisations at the moment, when you go to book a trip, somebody has to approve it — your manager or the office manager. But yeah, we've been able to get rid of approvals.
Mark Jones
Nice, so it’s just automated, what’s the process?
Nick Whitehead
It's actually something much bigger that we've worked on around how we build trust and trustworthiness into the product. As I said before, people's willingness to transact through agents is still relatively limited. So right from the very beginning with Serko AI, we built it around behavioural science principles. One of those principles is that if you give people a choice that can be easily reversed, they're more likely to take it.
So what we did is build into Serko AI from the beginning complete reversibility of every transaction. Anything that you book in Serko AI — any flight, any hotel room — you can get a 100% refund at any point up until three hours before departure or day of check-in for your hotel, even if it's a non-refundable rate.
Mark Jones
Okay, how did you do that? Because — yeah, this is where we get into proper business model transformation, not for you, but for your whole supply chain.
Nick Whitehead
Yeah, 100%. And this is for us really one of the big changes — or maybe more of an unlock, a capability that just hasn't really existed before. It does a couple of things. One is it lowers that trust barrier. If you can book your flight and your hotel through Serko AI, and at any point you can cancel and get all that money back, it lowers the trust barrier. It makes it much easier to transact with confidence. And we recognise that trust is something that compounds over time.
But it also enables things like the elimination of approvals. Every trip you book doesn't need to be reviewed by somebody else, unless it goes outside policy or for some reason it looks like it needs a review, in which case we'll flag it to your manager or to the travel manager and say, "Look, Mark's booked this trip. It's $300 more than the budget allows, but here's the context around it. It's a last-minute trip that Mark's booked to land this big deal, or the client's asked him to be there for 7:00 AM and he's going to be staying right there, and this is the only hotel, and here is every other option we showed Mark, and actually this is a pretty good deal." So you can go, "Yep, sure. Cool. All good." Or for some reason you might have decided to take the mick and you've booked a five-star resort hotel that is $500 more than it would normally cost, and the manager can just click cancel, reverse that, and send it back for you to take another look at your options. So rather than making every trip have to be approved in advance, we can use technology and the context that we now have through this technology to just review the anomalies.
Mark Jones
Okay. So context then becomes a far more significant part of the story. And this really is a marketing tech story, what you're doing here. A lot of what you've had to focus on as a CMO is the tech side of marketing. I'm now also wondering — on the flip side, there's the whole creative world, and where does that fit into what you see will be important going forward?
Nick Whitehead
Yeah. Everything we've talked about today so far is all about the tech and AI, but actually when it comes to articulating the value proposition and the benefits to the end user, we're not talking about AI at all. In fact, on our homepage, I don't think we even use "artificial intelligence" or "AI" at all other than in the URL, because people aren't buying technology — they're buying what it will do for them. And so yes, the tech is important. It's unlocked a generational shift in capability of what we can do, and it's changed the business model. But it hasn't changed some of the fundamentals of good marketing. As you mentioned, creativity, having a strong brand that is creative, that is differentiated, that resonates, that has an emotional connection — the importance of that has not diminished at all.
Mark Jones
So in America, what are you launching with? It's not Serko AI, I presume. It's some other brand?
Nick Whitehead
No, we're launching with Serko AI as the brand in market. This is one of the other changes that we're going through — we're acquiring customers directly. So it's a direct-to-customer model with the Serko AI brand. We are still also looking at that partnership model with some of the travel management companies. But in those cases we're not going with a white label option. We're sticking with Serko AI as the brand that they will be distributing.
Mark Jones
Oh, okay. So that literally is the address — the URL?
Nick Whitehead
Serko.ai. Yeah.
Mark Jones
Except if you're in Australia and you can't do it. The old computer reseller channel journo in me wants to know how upset your partners might be about going direct. Isn't that a taboo in a market like this?
Nick Whitehead
Look, it's not without some degree of friction. But it was really important for us to do that for a few reasons. One was, this is a very new offering. It's a very different way of using technology to solve the kind of challenges that business travellers have had for decades. And we needed to be very, very close to the end user, to the customer, to be able to get the signals that we need to refine and optimise that offering. We also have to validate to our partners that this is something that travellers and companies want. So we've got to go and prove that demand is there. And we're testing out some different commercial models with this offering. So that's another way for us to test, learn, prove, and iterate very quickly by having that direct model. But the good news for the partners is that everything that we're learning through this, and all of the offerings that we're developing for that direct-to-customer model, is available to our partners as well.
Mark Jones
Tell me about the conversations you have at the executive level. What's the level of coordination — how are you working together to bring something complex like this together, and how is that changing your role as CMO? What are you finding in terms of the conversations you're having now versus maybe 12 months ago?
Nick Whitehead
Yeah. When you hear about the evolution of the role of the CMO, the word orchestration comes up a lot. And orchestration is absolutely something that I've seen in practice over the last 12 months as we've taken this from an idea to a concept to a proof of concept to a beta and now to a fully live product. And that orchestration — the sphere of it — is just getting broader and broader. This has been a very close collaboration with our product leadership, with our data, with engineering, with marketing technology, with our revenue and commercial teams. The level of coordination and collaboration that we've had to have has been night and day ahead of where it has had to be in the past, where we've been able to operate relatively siloed without causing too many challenges. But with the pace of change that we've been able to run at with Serko AI, it has forced a different model that is much more joined up and much more coordinated and much more organically connected — with changes that we make in one area and the impact that has on others.
Mark Jones
Are you finding you still need to champion the customer as much as maybe you might have in the past as a CMO?
Nick Whitehead
Yeah, 100%, if not more than ever. And in fact, the appetite for insights from customers — across product, commercial, engineering, design — has been huge. And the attention that those insights get is really fantastic to see. There is a great focus on solving those customer needs, and I think particularly now with the pace that we can develop with AI, and this is an AI-native platform, the speed that we can go at is quite phenomenal. But it also means that there are so many things that we could be doing, and the way that we understand what we should be doing is really informed by customer insights, just as it always has been. But it's become more important than ever.
Mark Jones
Okay. So I'm imagining the listener or viewer thinking about their own experience — what's your advice going to be in terms of dos and don'ts when you take on something this bold?
Nick Whitehead
Look, a few things have worked really well for us. One was being effectively all in. We didn't just take AI and kind of add it onto some existing products and AI-ify or AI-enable our existing technology. We felt that it was a time for us to be bold. We didn't copy a single line of code from our existing products, even though they were already very successful and well-proven. So we started with an AI-native offering, and that unlocked all sorts of capabilities that we think are quite innovative.
And then we were also able to build effectively from scratch an AI-native marketing function that has helped us build something that is really best of breed, and it's helped to really break down the silo between product and marketing from a user experience perspective. When you're dealing with effectively marketing personal assistants or AI assistants, you want the user to build a relationship and build a connection with the product. And for that to work, marketing has to be a very integrated part of that connection and that user experience. So we've moved from a world where marketing is driven by campaigns that run on their own agenda and sit separate to product, to something that is actually tightly integrated.
Mark Jones
Sounds like you've got a pretty good engineering and tech team doing all this stuff. I'm thinking about the marketing team. What is your marketing team going to look like into the future?
Nick Whitehead
That's a great question. I wouldn't be foolish enough to predict what marketing teams of the future are going to look like. But what I can say is that I've been thoroughly impressed with the ability of the teams that we have to adapt and change and transform and embrace new ways of doing things. And I think the ways that CMOs or leaders of any parts of the business have been successful in the past is by bringing in people with great talent and capability, empowering them to do their best work, and giving them the kind of support and guidance and backing to be able to go and do that. And I don't see that changing.
Mark Jones
The backdrop of course is that everybody's freaking out at the moment. Microsoft's been in the news this week — something incredible, like 25% of their workforce that they're inviting to leave the building. So this is the backdrop to all of this. A lot of marketers are really quite concerned about where all this goes. What's the mindset that you're bringing that people could learn from?
Nick Whitehead
Yeah, I'd say a couple of things. One is I think you're right about that kind of anxiety. Particularly in certain areas of the US market, we see this around the role of AI and whether that's going to eliminate jobs and parts of the industry. For us, we still fundamentally believe in the power of human connection and the need for people to travel, to continue to meet — and that's where the magic happens, whether that's deals being done or companies being formed or what have you. So at a macro level, we still really believe in that power of human connection, and we don't think that's going to go away, and we're still seeing the market growing.
In terms of our approach, we are definitely seeing some great productivity gains across the board — whether that's in marketing, but certainly in engineering and other areas — from embracing AI. And as a company, I've been incredibly impressed by how quickly we moved to embrace AI and enable the organisation. We've got a great executive team who have really supported the business in this transformation. We haven't come into it from a sense of fear or worry about people losing jobs. It's been from much more of a position of optimism and excitement around how we can continue to do really bold and exciting things as a relatively small company.
Mark Jones
I reckon there are a few listeners that are slightly jealous of your job, so good on you for really being able to craft out a whole fascinating take on how marketing and MarTech are integrating. And of course, we do want to see that in Australia, so maybe you can add that to your 2027 list as well.
Nick Whitehead
Watch this space, Mark.
Mark Jones
That's it, mate. Well, Nick, thank you so much for being on The CMO Show. It's been great to catch up with you and thank you for sharing your story.
Nick Whitehead
So good to chat. Thanks, Mark. Appreciate the time.
Mark Jones
Cheers.
One of my reflections on the education component of what he spoke about is firstly, that it's really, really savvy. You want to spend time with your partners to really educate them on how your product and service works. Creating a certification is kind of clever, and there's some pride that comes with that, and we've seen that with many tech companies over the years. But then being able to have a long-term mindset — because of course it takes people a while to get up to speed. So my question to you is, if you're in the business of educating partners and customers, how patient are you? Do you have this kind of impatient short-term mindset, or are you prepared to really invest for the long haul? Because as the Serko example shows, if you can stay committed and keep it up, people will come with you on the journey and you'll do much better in the end. All right, well, that's it for this episode of The CMO Show. My name is Mark Jones. Until next time.