The Intelligent Age in Action — One App, One Journey, One Step Ahead

The GBTA 2025 Recap: Emburse Delivers on the Promise of Predictive, People-First Innovation

GBTA 2025 was more than a conference—it was a glimpse into a smarter, more strategic future for travel and expense. Emburse showed the industry what it looks like to move from tactical administration to intelligent orchestration, blending human domain expertise, data, automation and artificial intelligence. We previewed agentic AI capabilities built on clean, secure, and private data—enabling intelligent automation of workflows, policy enforcement, and fraud detection.

Emburse was proud to reveal transformative updates that simplify life for business travelers and empower finance teams with real-time spend control. We reinforced why Expense Intelligence powered by Emburse AI is more than a product feature or marketing hype—it's the foundation of today’s modern financial infrastructure.

If you missed Emburse at the show, here’s what you need to know.

Simplifying Travel and Expense in One Unified Experience

Our new integrated itinerary and expense experience is a major milestone in unifying how travelers and finance teams operate. It builds on what our strategic acquisition brought us with a traveler app that continues to be improved with the user experience in mind. Instead of toggling between apps or relying on disconnected workflows, users can now manage trip itineraries, receipts, expenses, and approvals all within the Emburse Enterprise mobile app.

Our customers spoke, and we listened.

For travelers, this means:

An agnostic experience no matter how you booked (or had to rebook) your trip
A seamless user experience that adapts to a traveler’s itinerary and preferences
Policy and compliance information with real-time AI analysis that checks for fraud to protect you from errors and delays
Real-time reminders and contextual guidance at the moment of spend
Fewer delays from missed receipts or last-minute submissions

For finance and IT leaders:

Real-time visibility into expenses as they occur, not days or weeks later
Embedded policy compliance, fraud checks, and predictive controls at the point of booking and submission
Elimination of app sprawl, improving adoption, and reducing IT complexity

This isn’t just a mobile upgrade. It’s the infrastructure for predictive workflows, agentic AI, and ultimately, the “one-click” expense experience we’re building today and bringing finance teams along the journey, to trust.

Receipts, Reimagined: Turning Everyday Transactions into Effortless Intelligence

Manual uploads, lost receipts, and delayed reconciliations continue to be among the biggest barriers to effective spend management, especially if reimbursement and payment data aren’t integrated. Beyond what we do in our existing integrations and with Emburse AI, our new receipt integrations with American Airlines AAdvantage Business™ and DoorDash for Business eliminate these inefficiencies with real-time, touchless receipt capture. And we’re continuing to add more integrations with these same capabilities. We’re also looking to drive innovation alongside not only NDC, but more direct GDS capabilities alongside our TMC partners.

With the new integration, AAdvantage Business™ flights and DoorDash meal receipts now flow directly into Emburse’s platform, automatically matching with card transactions and triggering policy-aware expense creation. This reimagined expense experience covers what business travelers need and want, with more enhancements to come as we continue delivering value for customers.

For finance teams, receipt integrations deliver:

Reduced fraud risk, thanks to trusted, first-party data
Improved compliance and audit readiness with structured, validated entries
Time savings for both travelers and admins
Control checks that turn audit complexity into actionable insights—highlighting outliers, GL posting decisions, policy exceptions, and contract discrepancies for review.

By removing the manual steps, we shift expense management from reactive to proactive, data-driven decision-making. This is Expense Intelligence in action. While analytics across T&E remain crucial for organizations, Expense Intelligence provides real-time insights that would traditionally take a week, a quarter, or even a year to obtain.

AI Folio: Solving Another Big Pain Point in T&E

We've already achieved industry-leading accuracy in reading receipts across multiple currencies, languages, and formats worldwide. However, hotel folios and rental car receipts are notoriously complex, perhaps deliberately so by suppliers. With AI Folio, Emburse uses AI-powered OCR and machine learning to extract and itemize every line from any format—PDF, mobile image, or email—in real time with industry-leading accuracy. Again, you spoke, and we listened and delivered!

Benefits include:

Greater user experience and ability to check mistakes against what was charged
Faster reimbursements thanks to structured, auto-categorized entries
Fewer errors means no more missed line items or misclassified charges
Scalable automation adaptable to global formats and workflows

AI Folio strengthens audit ability, streamlines reconciliation, and empowers organizations to operate with confidence and speed.

See our AI-powered OCR in action:

T&E Analytics to Optimize Spend Before It Happens

Traditional expense reporting only tells you what happened, but no one should live in the past with advanced technology now at our fingertips. Modern finance teams need to know what spend is happening now—and what should happen next.

Our new Travel & Expense Analytics suite offers:

Dashboards that unify travel and expense data
Breakdowns by vendor, department, and out-of-policy behavior
Benchmarking tools that highlight overspending and sourcing gaps
Specific programs and areas of analysis that are critical to our customers

The result: smarter procurement, tighter controls, and reduced spend leakage.

Sneak Peek: What’s Coming with Emburse Shop

We gave GBTA attendees a first look at an exciting new capability we’re building: Emburse Shop, a next-generation, AI-powered booking tool.

Unveiled as a live prototype at the Emburse booth, Emburse Shop showed how AI-driven corporate booking assistants can reshape how travel is planned, booked, and managed—all within a conversational, intuitive interface. We're also testing whether users prefer to interact with an AI agent to select the best, policy-compliant trip—or if the future lies in simply loading upcoming trips, travelers, or even events, and having the system automatically return the best-fit options for everyone at once. This feedback is crucial to us building a product that delivers exactly what travelers want.

While we’re keeping full details under wraps until the official product launch, here’s what you can expect:

Policy-aware shopping, built-in: Travelers receive real-time guidance during flight searches, helping them make compliant choices from the start.
Frictionless, mobile-first experience: Designed with the modern business traveler in mind, Emburse Shop will feel as seamless as today’s best consumer apps.
Embedded controls, smarter decisions: Finance and procurement teams gain visibility and influence before dollars are spent.
Integration with Emburse Enterprise & Professional: Ensure bookings and expenses are tightly linked for better reconciliation and reporting.

And this is just the beginning. What we demoed at GBTA was only a preview—Emburse Shop is set to transform the corporate travel experience and take it to a whole new level for business travelers, finance teams, and TMCs alike.

Bringing Clarity to a Fragmented Landscape

One of the loudest signals I’m hearing in the broader industry is this: fragmentation in travel content and booking workflows is reaching an inflection point. From multiple booking channels and layered systems, to content disparity and disconnected data, the travel ecosystem is growing more complex by the day. And that complexity comes at a cost—financial, operational, and human.

At Emburse, we recognize that integration is essential—and we’re continuing to build the right solutions with our partners to support the diverse needs of travel programs today. But we also know that connectivity alone isn’t enough. That’s why we’re going further, embedding Expense Intelligence powered by Emburse AI directly into how travelers book, spend, and submit—from a single experience that adapts intuitively and in real-time.

Instead of reacting to expenses after the fact, finance teams can now see, guide, and optimize spend before it even happens. Whether a traveler books through a TMC, a consumer site, or soon, with Emburse Shop, they’ll receive contextual, compliant guidance at the moment of decision— with zero guesswork.

This is how we move from fragmentation to focus. By embedding intelligence into every step of the journey—and combining it with smart, seamless integrations—we’re helping organizations simplify operations, reduce risk, and bring greater clarity and confidence for every dollar spent.

Expense Intelligence: From Innovation to Infrastructure

We entered GBTA 2025 with a clear message: Expense Intelligence powered by Emburse AI is no longer optional. It’s the foundation for how modern organizations should manage cost and risk to be truly agile in today’s unpredictable business environment.

From embedded receipt automation to unified mobile orchestration, our platform is built to:

Move finance from the back office to the front lines of strategic decision-making
Make travel managers the highlight of office of the CFO performance
Equip business travelers with intelligent tools that simplify and guide spend behavior
Enable agentic AI workflows that adapt and respond in real-time for a delightful user experience
Drive hyperautomation so AI-powered software can do the work for you and give new meaning to work-life balance.

At Emburse, we’re not just imagining a future where spend is smarter. We’re building it now — with our customers and partners.

If you’d like to see how these solutions come together to support your team’s goals, book a demo here.

And for more on this vision, explore earlier chapters of our Intelligent Age blog series:

Because in the Intelligent Age, success belongs to those who act with insight, not instinct.

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