A few years into its new leadership, Emburse is nearing the launch of its "reimagined" T&E experience, the latest move in the company's ambitions to be an "AI powerhouse of a company," CEO Marne Martin said.
The company demonstrated the new touchless user experience, for which it currently is signing up early adopters for the fall, at its recent Emburse in Motion user conference in New Orleans. The company said the new experience will cut expense reporting from a 30-minute task to just a few minutes of review. Chief product officer Paul Nagy said it "takes the mundane task of expense management and simplifies it," with an AI agent that "make it so easy that we don't have to do anything."
The agent, Nagy said, can interpret data from receipts, itineraries and card data to match them up and automatically create expense reports, with the user prompted to provide any missing information, such as a business purpose. In the review, the agent shows its work, so the user can understand how the report was put together as a way of building trust in the new experience.
The experience also comes with the ability to turn it off, in case a user wants to go back to the classic experience for a task.
"If it's late on a Friday night and they need to finish what they're doing and don't have time to learn a new experience—even though it's really easy—they can always switch back and not lose any of the information," Nagy said. "They're still in the flow."
AI promises, of course, are becoming de rigueur for corporate technology offerings, but Emburse executives said what they are building is beyond an agent bolted on to existing infrastructure. Chief technology officer Ken Ringdahl said the company has been building a "foundational layer" of AI from which it is building its offerings.
That layer goes back to when Emburse was tackling problems around the optical character recognition process, which Ringdahl said had been a source of customer dissatisfaction with five different platforms in the process out of Emburse's control. As such, Emburse "engineered the heck out of everything around it," working both to perfect the image before it was sent to OCR and post-processing checks.
Emburse built out that AI layer with training from more than a billion spend transactions, gaining the ability to understand context, adapt formats and note missing or unclear information around transaction data.
"We all have access to the same Large Language Models—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini," Ringdahl said. "It's everything we've structured around the AI is what has made our accuracy, performance and latency better."
That will enable further expansion for Emburse beyond its upcoming T&E launch, such as payroll, Martin said.
"We're doing it in a way that can build a platform to be expanding what we can do in the office of the CFO, after we nail everything in T&E," she said. "That will enable our customers to keep expanding with us, as Emburse."
Amid that expansion, Martin said the company has no interest in becoming a travel management company and in fact is seeing growing interest from TMCs as partners. TMCs are seeing some shifts in the technology partner landscape with American Express Global Business Travel and SAP Concur's Complete partnership, following which Concur reworked its own partnership program, and the emergence of new programs, such as Amadeus Cytric's Prime Partner program.
"They see that we're accelerating the innovation," Martin said. "Even the really partner-first TMCs, I wouldn't say they are able to accelerate technology innovation as fast as we are, so they're starting to see how they might parter with us on technology."
Emburse in recent years has seen a significant change in its leadership makeup, with Martin taking the CEO position in early 2024. Nagy and Ringdahl joined shortly afterward, as did chief revenue officer Michele Shepard.
Martin said when she took the leadership role, she knew she needed to cultivate current leaders at the company—"including our head of AI data science, who was kind of ignored before I came"—but also to "recruit in some people … that had scaled companies faster into a larger level."
The company itself was born of the unification of its brands, including Certify and Chrome River, in early 2020 and has continued to grow through acquisition. Martin said the AI foundation is also preserving the company against the "Saas-pocalypse"—the loss of value in software-as-a-service providers as AI disrupts legacy workflows and systems—with the capability to build quickly on that layer.
"It's how we're thinking differently about the software development lifecycle, using AI to move fast in what we can deliver in AI without sacrificing quality," Martin said. "As much as Emburse is a story about how we're reinventing the T&E industry, we're also showcasing how a software company can reinvent from what was many long-standing, founder-owned companies into something that's really changing the industry."
Disclosure: BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker talked to Marne Martin and other executives during the Emburse in Motion conference. Emburse covered his travel expenses to the conference, where he moderated a session.