Ilan Twig

CTO & Co-founder @navan. 🌊🎹🔬

[Navan @Navan]

Navan’s EMEA expansion continues: Swedish rail is here 🇸🇪

Through our partnership with SilverRail, travelers can book more than 20 Swedish rail carriers like SJ AB and VR directly in the Navan app.

We’re bringing more sustainable, self-service travel options to the Swedish market and beyond.

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

"What the internet did to the physical travel agency, Agentic AI and TravelClaw will do to forms and tables."

Last week, I had the opportunity to share my vision for the future of Navan in front of hundreds of customers, prospects and suppliers.

Check out my full keynote below!

[Navan @Navan]

Catch @itwig's FULL #Navigate26 AI Keynote and glimpse the future of intelligent T&E 👇

[00:05] Introduction

[01:57] The Acceleration of Technological Revolutions

[03:33] The Evolution of Travel Booking

[08:58] The AI & Generative AI Era

[16:12] The Agentic Revolution

[21:17] Ava, Navan Cloud, and OpenClaw

[26:30] The Singular Opportunity for Navan

[29:14] Introducing TravelClaw

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

Stop prompting your AI and start giving it responsibilities: Ilan Twig says the era of the chatbot is over, and the age of the autonomous, "anxious" agent is here. 🚀 #AI #TechTrends #AgenticAI
https://t.co/wy0dAjvMo5

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

What can I say... it looks f cool! Go @Navan !!

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

Spending the day in New York at the Reuters Momentum AI conference today. Great to be on stage with Brad Thompson of @Target, discussing agentic AI in retail, and Jack Gage of @RivieraPartners, on the future of AI-powered executive search.

Big thanks to @Reuters for having me!

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

I am so excited to take the stage at this year’s Reuters Momentum AI in NYC on Tuesday, April 28 at 10am ET.

I'm looking forward to sharing insights and connecting with other AI leaders. If you will be there, drop a note in the comments, I’d love to meet you!

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

The big lesson? Professional AI tools need more than just "intelligence" - they need discipline.

From "smart forgetting" (context compaction) to multi-agent parallelism, Anthropic has set a new bar for how we build AI-native developer tools. 🚀

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

A rare and fascinating look into the high-quality engineering behind Anthropic's Claude Code!

The recent tech exposure of the CLI’s code confirms what many suspected: the "secret sauce" for elite AI coding isn't just the model; it’s the amazing agentic harness built around it.

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

The community’s response has been a testament to the quality of this work. Developers are already studying these patterns in community-led ports like claw-code (Python).

It’s an incredible learning opportunity to see how top-tier teams handle complex, parallel AI workflows.

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

Turns out the "75W" limit on airplane outlets is not a suggestion. Tried to train a model on my RTX 5090 laptop at 30,000 feet and successfully performed a DOS attack on my own seat.

10 minutes of total darkness and a dead phone later, I have learned my lesson. ✈️🔌⚡️

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

Read more here: https://t.co/mguNIisJt5

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

It’s been a big week at @Navan!

Between the strong Q4 earnings we announced today and the upcoming launch of TravelClaw - there’s a lot to be excited about right now.

Thanks @btnonline for covering this next era of AI innovation we’re driving. More to come!

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

TravelClaw is coming soon 👀.

Check out my latest blog post to see how we are changing the future of agentic travel: https://t.co/oWkpeFH1PG

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

OpenClaw, from Meta...

[Manus @ManusAI]

Today, we're taking Manus out of the cloud and putting it on your desktop.

Introducing My Computer, the core feature of the new Manus Desktop app. It’s your AI agent, now on your local machine.

[Navan @Navan]

At Navan, our scale gives us access to unrivaled content from countless sources. But consolidating that massive scale can get messy, and existing solutions couldn't handle the complexity.

Today, we announced our new AI-powered hotel content catalog designed to solve the industry’s most persistent lodging challenge: inconsistent room and rate information. We're now using AI as a universal translator that sorts through millions of listings, eliminating the noise and ensuring total accuracy.

Here’s what this means for our customers:

✅ Total confidence: No more guessing if two rooms are the same.
📈 More value: 70% more rate options for every room, thanks to better mapping.
🏨 Expanded content: Our catalog now makes it easier than ever to grow our inventory and direct connections.

Hear our VP of Product Design, Kate McCarthy break down the tech that makes it possible:

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

Navan Edge has landed, giving business travelers everywhere their very own AI-powered travel assistant.

This is the breakthrough that leaves the rest of the travel industry behind – and is the ultimate example of how we obsess over what matters to business travelers.

[Navan @Navan]

Most companies are using AI to play defense. That sounds… boring.

We’d rather go on offense. 🚀

Say hello to Navan Edge.

We’re giving business travelers their own personal VIP agent and genius EA, ready to:

✈️ Anticipate your needs
🌪️ Manage travel disruptions proactively
🍽️ Handle every detail of your hotel stay, with flights and dinner reservations coming soon

Check out the video below with Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and a16z's @DavidGeorge83 to hear how we’re bringing a C-suite travel experience to everyone, powered by AI.

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

Running it on my RTX5090 - see how funny its thinking on a simple "Hi" is:

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

Olmo 3 is a breakthrough: a state‑of‑the‑art reasoning model built fully in the open. With all data, code, and checkpoints released, it turns frontier‑level AI into a reproducible recipe, unlocking a new wave of models anyone can build. https://t.co/Y8IpD3V7NL

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

@dbabbs @tryprofound @lightspeedvp @sequoia @kleinerperkins @MattEvantic @Saga_Ventures @southpkcommons Congratulations!

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

@LivicusInvest @martin_casado @a16z Thanks for the comment. We do explore all options ;-)

[Ilan Twig @itwig]

🧵 The "AI Stack" is Shifting East.
1/ The uncomfortable truth: While the West brags about building "God-models," Silicon Valley is quietly building on Chinese foundations.

Martin Casado (@martin_casado) of @a16z recently dropped a bombshell: 80% of AI startups pitching them are now using Chinese open-source models like Qwen and DeepSeek. 📉🇺🇸

2/ This isn't just about "cheap alternatives" anymore. With the release of Kimi K2.5 (Jan 2026), the intelligence gap has officially closed.

On "Humanity’s Last Exam" (HLE)—the ultimate reasoning test—Kimi K2.5 scored 50.2%, effectively leapfrogging GPT-5 (41.7%) and Claude 4.5. 🧠💥

3/ Beyond raw smarts, it’s about "Agentic Power."Kimi K2.5 introduced Agent Swarm technology. It doesn't just "think"—it delegates. It can autonomously spawn and coordinate up to 100 sub-agents to solve a single task in parallel.

While we build better chatbots, they are building autonomous digital workforces. 🤖💼

4/ Why this matters for the US:

Dependency: What happens to the SV ecosystem if these "open" weights are suddenly restricted?

Talent Migration: We are training a generation of US engineers to be experts in Chinese architectures, not our own.

The Moat is Gone: US labs are spending billions for 1% gains; Moonshot AI (Kimi) just hit parity at a fraction of the cost.

5/ The Map is Changing. The US is winning the "Sprint" for the smartest closed API, but China is winning the "Marathon" for the most-used infrastructure.

The "front-end" is still Californian. But the "back-end"? It's moving East.

If you’re building in AI today, are you choosing the "Prestige" model or the "Practical" one? The market has already decided. 🏗️🇨🇳