How Agentic AI Automates Travel and Expense Management

If your employees enjoy booking trips, planning offsite meetings, assembling expense reports, or setting aside more engaging work to perform any of those tasks, it might be time for an intervention. The latest advancement in artificial intelligence­—agentic AI—can initiate, plan, orchestrate, and execute those tasks and other busywork while increasing efficiency and reducing hassles and frustrations.

How AI Agents Help Increase Efficiency in Travel & Expense

Agentic AI, powered by specialized AI agents, can launch into action from conversational interfaces such as Joule, the AI solution working across the SAP ecosystem, including SAP Concur solutions. By accessing business information and orchestrating key processes, agentic AI helps streamline tasks like planning a trip or filling in details for expense reports.

This blog will explore how:

• Agentic AI is different than other forms of AI in its abilities to initiate, act, and orchestrate multi-step processes.

• AI agents in SAP Concur address business pain points such as assembling expense reports, booking travel, verifying receipts, and planning off-site meetings.

• Organizations can develop new approaches and metrics for calculating ROI from AI.

AI Agents Orchestrate a New Level of Business Innovation

Learn how agentic AI solves problems and unifies processes and people, how SAP Concur is making AI advancements, and how to strategically calculate ROI on AI investments.

Read the whitepaper

Why Is Agentic AI Different from Generative AI?

AI agents build upon advances brought by generative AI, which really came into the mainstream starting in 2023. Based on your prompts, generative AI can create new content —emails, reports, images­—and leverages large language models like Open AI and Claude to write, summarize, and edit. But all those powerful capabilities depend on user direction: You have to tell it what you want and how it should be delivered.

Agentic AI differs in key ways. It can:

• Prompt actions

• Design and execute plans

• Enlist other AI agents to orchestrate complex tasks

With agentic AI, you ultimately control the input, but there’s less handholding. If, for example, you’re planning an off-site team meeting, a specialized AI agent can weigh factors like proximity to one of your organization’s offices, gather compliant airfare options, and suggest locations that are the easiest and least disruptive to the greatest numbers of team members. Or as a sales representative examines orders and ponders the health of a long-lasting client relationship, the AI agent can help them plan a trip (and suggest other nearby customers to visit). You don’t need to provide this explicit direction or context because the agent already has it.

How Is SAP Concur Putting Agentic AI to Work to Solve Business Problems?

AI agents in Concur solutions build on our decade-plus of AI innovation, which began with machine learning and OCR technology. Concur continued to evolve with the rise of generative AI, which can generate new content using a large language model. Now, AI agents and their ability to perform complex, multistep tasks represent the next step in our AI journey.

“We are able to develop tools that solve real-world business problems and deliver real-world benefits like starting an expense report,” says Fred Fredericks, General Manager and Chief Product Officer. “Where judgment actually matters, people are involved, and we make sure that people can see what the AI is doing.”

What is Joule?

Joule is SAP’s conversational, cross-platform AI solution with multiple dimensions. Embedded in Concur travel, expense, and invoice solutions – as well as SAP solutions across finance, procurement, HR, and more— Joule can converse, supply information, and initiate and orchestrate multistep workflows.

It utilizes specialized agents to perform a task, enlists other agents to assist, and converses with partners and suppliers while connecting relevant data, tools, and applications. For example, an employee working in a Microsoft 365 application can chat with Joule in plain language, inside the app, to book a trip or gather budget information without stepping away from the presentation or report they’re crafting.

How Do Concur AI Agents Tackle Specific Pain Points?

To realize the great potential of agentic AI, over half of the Concur product development team has been working to create agents that simplify tasks that previously cost time, energy, and frustration. More agents are on the way, but here are recent examples.

Working within Concur Travel:

• Booking Agent is powered by the Joule solution and accessible from within travel, expense, and other solutions, meaning the employee doesn’t have to make a distracting exit from the work they’re doing to book a trip. A simple typed trip request surfaces compliant trip options and suggests itineraries.

• Meeting Location Planner Agent streamlines the time-consuming process of planning off-site meetings in a way that’s cost-effective and least disruptive to participants. The meeting planner supplies dates, number coming, their locations, and the AI agent quickly delivers compliant options.

And available within Concur Expense:

• Expense Automation Agent begins an expense report as transactions show up in Concur Expense, filling in the in the report header and loading details from receipts and other purchases. The employee reviews, refines, and submits instead of having to type in every detail.

• Receipt Analysis Agent analyzes receipt photos collected by the ExpenseIt solution, notices missing details, and then uses vendor names, itineraries, travel history, and other sources to fill in addresses and other details.  

• Pre-Submit Receipt Check looks for compliance issues like missing data, duplicates, and receipt-expense mismatches and suggests resolutions to employee­—before the report goes in and accumulates flags.

• Expense Report Validation Agent, ahead of submittal, checks for missing receipts, incomplete entries, and mistakes that can lead to a report being returned, helping prevent rework for the employee and others down the line.

“We’ve moved from AI that informs to AI that participates and brings intelligent tools into the way employees actually like to work,” says Fiona Ashley, SAP Concur Global Product Marketing Leader.

Why Calculating ROI from AI Requires New Measures and Mindsets

CFOs and other business leaders are clearly observing benefits from AI adoption. They told us in a recent CFO Insights survey that AI has improved decision-making, revenue, productivity, risk-reduction, and cost reduction. But one thing they’re accustomed to assessing, the return on their investments, has proven a bit of challenge.

Data quality is often a stumbling block. Sometimes AI is applied to overly ambitious projects or ones that don’t home in on business-critical problems. Being a newer technology, patience, experimentation with KPIs, and evaluating productivity and efficiency from new angles are part of the recommended playbook for measuring your AI success.

To measure AI ROI, you must:

• Ensure your data is complete, accurate, and consistent. AI requires large amounts of data to achieve the best results; the same is true of ROI calculation.

• Start with focused projects, such as increasing your customer base or producing real-time insights you can act upon.

• Look at metrics such as time saved booking trips, submitting expense reports, or reviewing exceptions (which may be flagged in AI-powered audits).

“The fact that you don’t have to sit there and type in the name of the restaurant and the date and time, those are productivity enhancements that free employees for other things,” says Charlie Sultan, President of Concur Travel. “It’s about identifying problems before they happen, and about being less reactionary and more proactive. The KPIs are still being developed for a lot of that.”

Conclusion: Powering a Seamless, Connected Business

Agentic AI offers a new way to reach across departments, functions, and processes to connect information and people and remove barriers to visibility and efficiency. AI agents, such as those powered by Joule, can streamline workflows and bolster connectivity while reducing some of the frustrations that come with some business processes.

“If you can get to a world where things are stitched together—whether it’s your calendar, CRM tool, vacation management system, budgeting system, travel system—then all of those things no longer live in isolation,” Sultan says. “We’re working on AI that can understand your intent across the entirety of the planning, booking, approvals, expense submission, sales, and client engagement.”

AI Agents Orchestrate a New Level of Business Innovation

Learn how agentic AI solves problems and unifies processes and people, how SAP Concur is advancing the technology and other AI, and how to strategically calculate ROI on AI investments.

Read the whitepaper

FAQs: How Agentic AI Delivers a New Level of Innovation

What Is Agentic AI, and How Is It Different from Generative AI?

Generative AI responds to prompts by creating content. Agentic AI goes further by initiating actions, planning, coordinating multiple steps, and completing tasks while keeping people in control.

How Does Joule Work with SAP Concur AI Agents?

Joule is a conversational interface that connects SAP solutions and AI agents. Employees can request tasks in plain language, such as booking travel or retrieving budget information, without leaving the platform in which they are working.

What Business Tasks Can SAP Concur AI Agents Automate?

AI agents in Concur can provide compliant travel options, plan off-site meetings, start expense reports, analyze receipts, identify missing information, and check reports for errors or policy issues before submission.

How Can Organizations Measure the ROI of AI?

Start by ensuring you have accurate, consistent data and focused use cases. Measure outcomes such as time saved, fewer manual tasks, reduced exceptions, improved compliance, and higher employee productivity.

What Are the Overall Benefits of AI Agents?

By automating repetitive work and connecting business systems, AI agents reduce distractions, improve efficiency, increase visibility, and allow employees to focus on higher-value activities.