AI in Travel and Expense Can Fuel Competitive Advantage. Where Do You Stand?

Every business seeks an edge, and artificial intelligence (AI) promises to deliver a competitive advantage through once unlikely sources: fragmented business travel data spread across your organization. While many organizations have started implementing AI-enabled T&E solutions, they might wonder where they stand on the T&E transformation journey and what’s to be gained from taking the next steps.

A new IDC Spotlight, Beyond Reports: The AI-Enabled T&E Maturity Model for Unlocking Business Intelligence, provides a roadmap for shifting your T&E from a tedious back-office function to a strategic powerhouse, supplying actionable spend management insights that drive decisions and support growth.

The AI-Enabled T&E Maturity Journey

The latest IDC Spotlight sponsored by SAP Concur considers five stages of T&E maturity through the lenses of technology and AI, digital payments, data and integration, people and culture, and governance and compliance.

You’ll learn about the stages, evaluate how your business aligns with travel and expense management best practices, and gain other insights including:

• The benefits and challenges of each stage.
• The evolution of AI in spend management with each successive stage.
• How AI-fueled SAP Concur solutions help organizations progress to T&E maturity.

Benefits, Challenges, and Competitive Advantage of AI-Enabled T&E

IDC’s travel and expense maturity model is a roadmap for data-driven, strategic spend management that supplies business intelligence and competitive advantage to the entire organization. This model can serve as a rubric to pinpoint where your organization is on the journey and determine what it can gain as you advance to each stage.

Stage 1: Foundational Automation

Digital tools are basic as the organization moves away from paper and manual processes, with data remaining siloed and the T&E function seen as a drain on resources.

• Challenges: Use of AI in expense management is minimal, payments often aren’t linked to T&E platforms, integration is limited, employees can be resistant to change, and compliance can only be managed after spend occurs.
• Next-stage benefits: Organizations gain more proactive control over spending, improved integration capabilities increase T&E data visibility, and the introduction of AI and ML strengthens travel and expense data analytics and decision-making.

Stage 2: Enhanced Insights

Instead of being retrospective, T&E management starts to become a forward-looking tool that delivers business intelligence. Your T&E platform integrates with digital payments and core business systems, helps enforce basic rule-based compliance, uses ML to detect anomalies, and establishes clear audit trails.

• Challenges: Although solutions can provide insights, any subsequent actions, research, or requests still require significant human involvement. With your systems not yet fully unified, manual workarounds and reconciliation remain.
• Next-stage benefits: AI makes T&E processes more intuitive and personalized, audits require less manual effort, payments are fully integrated, and solutions intelligently summarize expenses, adding context for approvers.

Stage 3: Generative AI-Powered

A truly intelligent T&E platform can deliver more complex reasoning to transform business travel and spend data into actionable insights. It can create spending narratives that clarify trends and anomalies, handle payments seamlessly, provide personalized travel options, engage and support users, significantly automate audits, and spot compliance risks.

• Challenges: The strategic spend management platform isn’t autonomous; it still depends on people making decisions and resolving issues. While integration has expanded, it is not seamless or capable of real-time communication with internal and external systems.
• Next-stage benefits: Human intervention becomes minimal, as the platform can act proactively. Payments are conducted autonomously and optimize cash flow, and the system automatically handles bookings, changes, and reimbursements.

Stage 4: Agentic AI-Driven

Here, the AI-enabled system can act on behalf of employees or provide options for review. It can book and rebook flights, supply data to enhance vendor negotiations, empower employee/solution collaboration and innovation, and use integrated data to enable autonomous decisions.  The technology manages workflows in their entirety, allowing employees to focus on strategic work.

• Challenges: A largely independent system can create new management and governance challenges, as decisions must be explainable and transparent. With the complexity, the organization might need new skills in their travel, finance, and IT teams.
• Next-stage benefits: With its high level of intelligence, the system can help predict risks, take preventive actions, and foster human-AI collaboration where the advanced technology handles routine tasks and augments human capabilities.

Stage 5: The Ecosystem

At this highest stage, AI in spend management has created a centralized system where T&E’s rich data is fully integrated across the organization. The T&E platform is dynamic, continually learning and improving. Payments are fully integrated, employees and AI work together to drive innovation, and compliance is adaptive.

• Challenges: With the speed of adaptation, organizations must make sure innovation doesn’t outpace control. Specialized skills and new operating models will be needed to maintain security and smooth operations. Businesses must commit resources to managing the competitive advantage they have built.
• Ongoing benefits: With a resilient, secure system built to manage challenges and evolve, the organization can handle whatever the future holds – and retain its edge.

Competitive Advantage Grows as AI Becomes More Embedded  

With an overview of the five stages of T&E maturity, you may have a clearer view of your organization’s progress. AI is at the core of that evolution, so a deeper exploration of its intensifying use can further clarify the stages and benefits.

Stage 1: AI in expense management

AI use is cursory at best. Automation is basic, uses OCR (optical character recognition) to digitize receipts, and can enforce simple rules to manage expense and invoice workflows. Few insights are possible, and much work is still manual.

Stage 2: AI in expense management

AI use grows as machine learning begins to spot trends and anomalies, flag non-compliant and possibly fraudulent spending, and enable data-driven insights and decisions.  In effect, this stage lays the foundation for generative and other advanced forms of AI.

Stage 3: AI in expense management

Generative AI arrives to interpret and summarize expense reports and other business travel data, recommend the best payment form for each transaction, supply personalized and compliant travel options, assist with audits, make processes intuitive, provide support, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Stage 4: AI in expense management

AI gains greater agency and autonomy, either acting on its own or giving employees options to review. The system can optimize cash flow, book and rebook travel independently, supply proactive insights, automatically make decisions, and adjust policies as conditions demand.

Stage 5: AI in expense management

AI serves as an intelligent assistant for humans, predicts risks, and dynamically adapts policies and workflows to ward off threats. The intelligent technology has become part of the organization’s culture, serving as a trusted partner in innovation.

Considering SAP Concur for Intelligent, AI-Enabled Travel and Expense

Long a leading provider of strategic spend management software, SAP Concur has integrated AI into our T&E solutions for a decade and has made major investments to expand AI’s use in existing and new solutions.

The IDC Spotlight notes that Concur Travel, Concur Expense, Concur Invoice, and extended solutions result in a single platform with features including:

• Digitized and automated workflows
• Built-in travel and expense data analytics
• Personalized travel recommendations
• Seamless integration with payment providers and other systems

“SAP Concur is designed to help organizations achieve T&E maturity,” says the IDC report, later adding: “For the pinnacle of maturity, SAP Concur is focused on building a fully integrated, cognitive ecosystem, where its platform acts as an enterprise-wide asset.”

FAQ: IDC’s AI-Enabled T&E Maturity Model

Q: What is the maturity model?

A: Across five stages, IDC traces the arc of transforming travel and expense management from a largely manual back-office task to an automated, AI-infused, and nearly autonomous provider of business intelligence. 

Q: What can I learn from the model?

A: An organization can determine where they are in their T&E transformation, what they can gain the next stage, and how to navigate the biggest T&E challenges. At each stage, the IDC Spotlight examines technology and AI, digital payments, data and integration, people and culture, and governance and compliance.

Q: What’s the role of AI in the T&E maturity model?

A: AI plays an ever-increasing role across each stage, moving minimal automation and advancing to a fully integrated, self-learning, intelligent assistant.

Q: What role can SAP Concur play in AI-enabled T&E transformation?

A: SAP Concur has an extensive history of working with AI and continues to innovate with new AI-enabled features, such as the Joule personal assistant. “As organizations progress, SAP Concur provides the technology to help them reach the highest levels of maturity. The platform is designed to be the central nervous system for T&E spend,” the IDC Spotlight says.