SAP Concur is embedding SAP's AI copilot Joule into both its Travel and Expense tools, and Concur also is deepening data integrations with both American Express and Mastercard, the company announced at its annual Fusion conference.
With Joule embedded in Concur Expense, users will be able to ask the tool questions as they work through the expense reporting process—why their report was flagged or what information is missing that is making them unable to submit, for example, Concur Travel president Charlie Sultan said. That capability is expected to be available in the second quarter of this year, according to Concur.
"It's making the experience easier for the user instead of having to call the help desk or anything like that," Sultan said.
In Concur Travel, Joule will be able to retrieve ballpark estimates of trip costs for travelers, which helps in the approval process but also has wider implications for group trip planning, he said. Concur currently is testing with some customers capabilities that can use those estimates to help determine location recommendations for small groups—similar to capabilities behind Troop—and related cost estimates for the team travel. That replaces a process that usually requires a planner or administrative assistant manually check flight costs to destination from a variety of origins, depending on where team members are based, according to Sultan.
"It's about how do we take as many steps out of the equation as possible," he said. "We have more travel and expense data than anyone out there, so I know that we'll be able to create very relevant, very accurate predictions.
Sultan said Concur is still working out how that will work in the product itself but expects it will be generally available later this year.
Concur also announced that it is working with both American Express and Mastercard to improve data capabilities at the time of purchase. With American Express, Concur has expanded its partnership to launch a "real-time authorization data capability," in which purchases on American Express corporate cards generate and categorize expenses in Concur Expense as the transaction occurs. Employees also receive mobile notifications to remind them of expense policies at the time of purchase.
Meal expenses will be the first category with that capability available, according to Concur, and Sultan said it would begin in the United States.
"Restaurants are not something you can typically pre-book and know what the cost is going to be, so for the travel professionals and expense management teams, that's going to be helpful for that information to flow through at the point of purchase, instantaneously," Sultan said. "If they're monitoring budgets, they'll have the data right away."
With Mastercard, Concur said it is expanding on an integration that automates expense entry at the time of purchase. That will enable more customers to tap that ability following its work with a subset of customers, according to Sultan.
In addition, Concur announced that American Express Global Business Travel has integrated its hotel marketplace into the new Concur Travel solution. Amex GBT's marketplace includes properties across 180 countries and includes negotiated programs and preferred partner rates.
Sultan said Concur continues to expand content in the new Concur Travel, as "most of the [global distribution systems] in most of the geographies have gone live." The Amex GBT marketplace adds more hotel content, with HRS already live and BCD Travel launching as well, he said.
"That gives customers who want to use those TMC hotel programs the ability to do so and realize greater savings," Sultan said. "What I like is in the past, we'd get a request from some extended stay provider in some far-flung corner of wherever that they wanted to be inside of Concur Travel, and we needed to figure out how to prioritize that given all the other requests that we have. Now, those customers can just go to their TMC, and they don't need to wait for us to do that."