CEOs are dooming business travel - maybe for good

Business travel as we've known it is a thing of the past. From Pfizer, Michelin and LG Electronics to HSBC Holdings, Hershey, Invesco and Deutsche Bank, businesses around the world are signaling that innovative new communications tools are making many pre-pandemic-era trips history.

Take Akzo Nobel, Europe's biggest paint maker, for instance. At its Amsterdam headquarters, Chief Executive Officer Thierry Vanlancker has spent the past year watching his manufacturing head, David Prinselaar, flap his arms, madly gesticulate and seemingly talk to himself while "visiting" 124 plants by directing staff with high-definition augmented-reality headgear on factory floors. A task that meant crisscrossing the globe in a plane before is now done in a fraction of the time - and with no jet lag. For Vanlancker, there's no going back...