Emburse is launching an AI agent capable of building review-ready expense reports, which it said will significantly cut down the time employees spend working with expense reports.
The Emburse AI agent, which the company said will be available in the fall of this year, will be embedded in T&E workflows and will be able to analyze receipts, transactions and traveler itineraries to automatically create expense reports. If information is missing, the agent will prompt users to provide it in natural language and automatically update the report with the provided information.
The company said the agent will be able to understand the context of expenses in filling out reports, such as if a meal should be charged back to a client or what local tax rules apply to the expense.
"The goal is no longer to help people fill out their expense reports; it's to take the task completely off their plates," according to Emburse chief product officer Paul Nagy. "Emburse is ensuring that what was once a manual, time-consuming process is now autonomously handled by an intelligent agent that understands context, makes decisions within the right guardrails, and works on behalf of the user who just reviews and submits."
Emburse said its agent works from the data that it pulls in across its integrations with airlines, travel management companies and travel provider marketplaces as well as data from mobile captures, email forwarding and calendar integrations. Emburse AI powers the interpretation, with the capability to categorize expenses, itemize receipts and pull out charges that should not be expensed in the report, according to the company.
With those capabilities, Emburse estimates that the expense report creation time will be under five minutes, compared with the industry average of 30 minutes. The AI agent also shows its rationale behind its decisions, which the company said gives a confidence boost to users and aids finance teams in audits.
The automated reports will cut down on the need for audits, as VP of product management Casi Rollins, speaking at Emburse's Emburse in Motion event in New Orleans on Wednesday, said 80 percent of reports will qualify for automatic approval. Earlier this year, Emburse launched an AI expense compliance tool, Emburse Assurance, that checks receipts for errors and policies issues prior to submission, and Rollins said that combined with the automation could boost automatic approval up to 90 percent.
Emburse said its agentic expense capabilities will be available in the fall, and the company will announce additional capabilities in the coming months. The company currently is signing up early adopters for the product.