With less than a week to go until GBTA 2025 in Denver, the energy in the business travel industry is building! At Emburse, we’re accelerating defining moments—one where corporate spend is evolving at a faster pace to meet the needs of modern business travelers and finance teams in our dynamic economy and trade environment.
The question is no longer if AI will transform travel and expense (T&E) but how fast we can apply it to deliver financial agility, enhanced accuracy, and strategic business impact for Emburse customers.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we explored how the Intelligent Age is reshaping how organizations manage travel, expenses, and payments. And over the past year, we’ve made meaningful progress toward our Travel 2.0 vision—transforming disconnected tools into a unified, intelligent experience. We introduced Emburse AI and launched our most advanced mobile experience to date—an AI-powered app for Emburse Enterprise—marking a major leap forward in intelligent, user-centric expense solutions.
Now, we’re focused on what’s next—and how you can be a part of that journey.
At Emburse, we believe the future of business travel (and expense management) is about eliminating friction in every spend interaction—not just getting from point A to B.
This next evolution is what we call Expense Intelligence.
Rethinking the Traveler and Finance Experience
Business travel has stayed relevant and continues to grow, but the systems that support it often operate in silos. Travelers still waste time juggling multiple tools just to manage a single trip, dealing with missed or cancelled flights or itemizing receipts and hotel folios line by line. Finance teams continue to piece together fragmented data from disconnected systems and face delays in reimbursement and reconciliation.
These pain points aren’t just inconvenient—they create unnecessary headaches, delay insights, and erode trust in the very systems designed to support smarter business travel. That’s why we’ve unified siloed processes into a single, mobile app experience, automating everything to guide spend behavior in real-time. It’s part of a vision that has led us to invest deeply in Expense Intelligence — combining AI-powered automation with trusted, intuitive experiences that make the T&E process easier and more seamless for business travelers.
From Admin Function to Finance Infrastructure
In the same way CRM platforms evolved from static databases to intelligent customer engagement engines, Expense Intelligence is transforming T&E from an administrative task that occurs after spend has already happened, into a strategic function within finance.
At Emburse, we define Expense Intelligence as the ability to:
- Automate complex workflows with trusted, intuitive AI, such as through our new AI Data Quality Dashboard
- Generate predictive insights for smarter spend decisions, which we provide through the T&E Analytics dashboards we announced at Emburse in Motion 2025
- Empower teams to focus on high-value work, not administrative tasks, which we enable through a unified mobile experience that removes manual effort and encourages users to submit expenses on time, providing faster visibility into spend
We’re already delivering these capabilities to customers like Sixt, BASF Catalysts, and Databricks through purpose-built tools like intelligent expense categorization, AI-powered OCR for automated receipt transcription, and smart bulk editing. And we’re building in full transparency by offering an AI Data Quality Dashboard to give finance teams confidence in their data.
Embedding Spend Controls into Every Workflow
In today’s dynamic compliance landscape, AI must serve not just as a business enabler—but as a financial safeguard. That’s why Emburse AI doesn’t just automate workflows—it actively enforces T&E policies in real-time, detects anomalies before approvals, and helps finance leaders stay ahead of fraud risk. We’ve embedded control and compliance directly into the entire spend lifecycle to help organizations reduce the risk of fraud and financial abuse, accelerate audits, and move from reactive checks to proactive assurance.
Enabling Spend Agility
As I’ll share on the GBTA Main Stage, uncertainty isn’t new—but the speed and complexity we face today demand new approaches. Businesses can’t afford to wait for perfect clarity. Instead, we can help our customers act with confidence, using real-time data and AI to gain clarity, reduce risk, and stay resilient in uncertain times.
We call this spend agility. It’s the ability to control costs, stay compliant, and move fast—all with less effort and greater visibility. Our strategic approach is about simplifying financial complexity without compromising flexibility. That’s the foundation of enterprise-ready spend intelligence.
While many companies talk about AI, we’re focused on delivering practical, trusted innovation that real finance teams can rely on. Whether you’re in finance, IT, or traveling for work, our goal is the same: to guide spend behaviour in real-time before dollars leave the organization.
AI Folio: Another Leap Toward Embedded Finance Intelligence
At the heart of Expense Intelligence is Emburse AI. This is not just a feature—it’s foundational to everything we do. From receipt capture and categorization to policy enforcement and predictive alerts, Emburse AI transforms raw data into decisions across the T&E lifecycle.
One example of this intelligence in action is AI Folio—a significant move in how we’re simplifying and optimizing spend while improving the T&E user experience.
Instead of requiring travelers to manually enter hotel or car rental charges—or rely on inconsistent third-party tools—Emburse AI automatically extracts and organizes folio data from any channel: mobile, email, or desktop. It adapts in real time to changing formats and captures every key detail.
It’s not just about convenience. Travelers and finance teams benefit from:
- Speed: Expense submissions in seconds
- Accuracy: No more template mismatches causing errors
- Consistency: Works reliably across all inputs and formats
- Control: Cleaner data and faster reconciliation
Because AI Folio is built natively into our platform, it scales more easily and delivers more control for finance teams.
Fintech as the Future of Spend Intelligence
At Emburse, we see the convergence of fintech, payments, and AP automation as the next frontier of intelligent spend. Travel and expense can’t exist in a silo—real business impact comes from unifying how organizations approve, pay, and reconcile. That’s why we’re investing in enhanced, integrated capabilities across T&E, AP and payments, ensuring finance teams not only move faster, but with greater precision, compliance, and influence.It’s how we’re enabling organizations to turn cost centers into strategic, front lines of control.
What’s Coming Up at GBTA 2025
Join us at our booth in Denver, where we’ll be unveiling our new Travel & Expense Intelligence Suite. Get hands-on with:
- Real-time AI insights from new T&E dashboards
- Our new unified mobile experience
- AI Folio
- …and more to be unveiled next week!
I hope to see you at the GBTA Main Stage where I will join a fireside chat with Paul Abbott, CEO, American Express Global Business Travel and Suzanne Neufang CEO, GBTA.
In this talk, I’ll discuss:
- How Emburse helps companies navigate uncertainty with transparency, insight, and trusted automation
- Why agentic and generative AI—when built to be explainable and secure—is the key to smarter travel and finance decisions
- How Emburse’s intelligent infrastructure is helping customers scale with confidence and control
This is our moment to reshape how we work, travel, and manage spend in the Intelligent Age.
Because this next era of financial technology is about removing friction, orchestrating smarter spend, and unlocking everyone’s full potential.
Contact us for a demo and stay tuned for more updates and exciting innovations from Emburse!