Revolutionising travel and expense with AI

WITH budgets tightening, market competition intensifying, and skilled talent increasingly harder to come by, there are growing expectations for teams across every organisation to do more with less. And finance teams are no exception.

This pressure, however, comes at an opportune time.

The increased availability of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for the general population over the past year has catapulted the technology into the mainstream, sparking widespread speculation about – and enthusiasm for – its potential impact on businesses.

Notably, the technology’s impact in the travel and expense (T&E) space in the last couple of years has been significant and is poised to become bigger.

With AI and machine learning, users get a better, more streamlined experience, while compliance teams get the accurate, comprehensive expense reports they need. It’s a win for both sides.

As market intelligence company IDC predicts, the Asia-Pacific region is expected to double its AI system spending, from 2022 to 2026, to some US$46.6 billion.

Generative AI alone is predicted to produce 10 per cent of all data within the next two years, fuelling expectations that increased integration of AI in the T&E industry will usher in a new era of productivity and innovation.

Impact of AI on T&E

Despite perceptions that enterprise usage of AI remains in its infancy, the technology is moving swiftly behind the T&E scene:

• Streamlining workflows: AI automation is helping businesses streamline tedious and time-consuming tasks such as expense tracking, reimbursement and travel planning, freeing up time for employees to focus on higher-value tasks.  
• Personalising recommendations: By leveraging AI’s ability to analyse vast amounts of data, businesses now can provide more personalised travel recommendations to their employees, taking into account factors such as travel history, preferences and budget. 
• Making compliance second nature: Compliance is a key concern for any business managing T&E. AI-powered systems have now become gatekeepers to help companies better comply with expense policies and other regulations. AI-powered expense-auditing technologies that focus on post-payment analysis, for example, can identify anomalies and potential fraud. 
• Improving cost savings: With its ability to identify patterns and optimise spending, AI is a powerful tool for driving cost savings. By analysing data on employee spending habits, travel patterns and vendor performance, for instance, AI-powered systems can identify areas of waste or inefficiency and recommend strategies for improvement. 

Integrated experiences

The above merely marks the early steps of AI for T&E management. The future will see an even-tighter integration between data and systems. And as business travel and expense management generate more and more data, T&E will be ideal for AI use cases.

Here are some realities that an AI-driven system can potentially unlock in the next few years:

• Immediate analysis and business value from data: The explosion of data in recent years has made it challenging to derive meaning and draw business value from it. But AI-driven technology can take on increasingly proactive analysis, and turn an explosion of data into more meaningful, targeted information to inform future decisions.

Visualise this: A finance director can use AI-driven T&E technology to immediately pull up proof points on the impact of their T&E programme on critical business priorities, such as accelerating sales success and improving employee experience. The solution will allow for real-time sales travel correlations to be visualised, sales hot spots to be identified, and sales teams to be advised on where to focus their travel. All of this can be achieved within minutes, without needing dozens of manual reports and analysts overlaying data to draw comparisons.

• Predict and shape future outcomes: Once data points are integrated into a one-stop solution driven by AI, predictive intelligent tools will emerge to pinpoint solutions to problems that organisations may not even yet be aware of.

Visualise this: Your company is planning a product launch event. Predictive intelligent tools in the spend management solution will analyse historical data and create a model that can forecast potential costs and benefits of the event. The solution can suggest the ideal venue based on who is supposed to attend the event as well as preferred suppliers to be involved in making the event happen.

Additionally, by extrapolating travel and spending trends, finance teams can better plan and negotiate their expense budgets. AI could provide the insights necessary to adjust or rewrite T&E policies based on business needs and realities. The technology could also help finance teams and travel managers determine actual return on investment of individual business trips and other expenses, providing lessons that can guide decisions for the company.

• Improving employee satisfaction: The ultimate end game of using AI is not just to automate processes. Instead, the true promise of the technology is to significantly reduce mundane and laborious tasks that have a negative impact on employee satisfaction and well-being and distract them from the strategic and creative elements of their role.

Visualise this: In 2022, US$1.6 billion in spending exceptions went unexamined by finance teams, given how time-consuming the manual auditing process can be. However, with AI, of the 2.8 million expense reports that passed through a “verifying” tool between January 2022 and June 2023, 97 per cent were audited automatically, leaving only 3 per cent to be scrutinised by a finance professional.

AI-driven technology is set to revolutionise T&E management. The mind-blowing reality is on the way, where AI is built into day-to-day experiences, supporting intelligent enterprises that are more resilient, profitable and sustainable in the long run.

The writer is head of market strategy at SAP Concur