SAP Concur has introduced a new suite of AI-powered tools, expanding the application of artificial intelligence beyond traditional traveler and travel manager roles into the critical areas of finance and administrative work. These innovative releases include an AI-assisted approval manager for expenses, advanced expense-policy benchmarking capabilities, streamlined virtual card management, and a groundbreaking 'leakage'-reporting tool developed in strategic alliance with Amex GBT. This alliance, formed in 2025, aims to integrate travel, expense, and marketplace data, with the leakage tool being one of its first significant outputs. Leakage, defined as travel spending that contradicts a company's managed travel policies, can account for over 30% of bookings at some organizations. Previously, much of this spending was invisible to Concur due to data residing with Amex GBT. The new tool addresses this by providing travel managers with a comprehensive overview of expenditures segmented by business unit, supplier, and individual traveler, offering a full picture of spend that was previously unattainable. This marks a strategic shift towards leveraging integrated data and AI to enhance compliance, efficiency, and oversight in corporate travel management, moving beyond older leakage prevention methods like TripLink, which has been part of SAP Concur's portfolio for over a decade. The announcements were made as the GBTA conference got underway in Chicago.
Compliance Gets An AI layer
This section details how an AI-assisted approval manager flags high-risk expense reports, providing explanations for its reasoning (e.g., spending spikes or receipt mismatches) alongside an employee's spending history, all within a single screen. SAP Concur emphasizes that this AI acts as decision support, not a replacement for human judgment, with companies retaining full responsibility for their own approvals and audits. Furthermore, enhanced administrative controls empower travel managers to benchmark their travel and expense programs, policies, and booking rules against anonymized data from SAP Concur's extensive customer base. This also helps in identifying any gaps or inconsistencies between a company's written policies and its system settings. The AI-assisted corporate card management feature further rounds out the finance tools, allowing administrators to build virtual card programs directly from policy documents and set approval rules using plain language. Employees can then request or update these cards conveniently via text. At its launch, this feature supports U.S. customers utilizing American Express virtual cards or select Mastercard issuers, with plans for broader integration with additional partners and Visa not yet included.
One Workspace For Delegates
This section introduces an AI-assisted dashboard specifically designed for delegates – employees who are authorized to manage travel and expenses on behalf of other individuals within the organization. This innovative workspace consolidates bookings, approvals, and expense reports into a single, unified interface, thereby eliminating the need for delegates to constantly toggle between separate tools and individual traveler profiles. The integrated AI proactively identifies tasks that require immediate attention and offers intelligent suggestions for the next best action, aiming to significantly streamline the delegate's workflow. SAP Concur projects that this could potentially reduce the time delegates spend on issue resolution by up to 25%, a figure derived from initial internal testing. This delegate dashboard is currently live for early adopters, with a wider availability planned for the third quarter of 2026. This enhancement is part of SAP Concur's broader strategy to leverage AI for improving operational efficiency and user experience in complex corporate travel management scenarios.
