American Express Taps Microsoft AI for New Expenses Tool

25.08.2023 - 14:15 / skift.com / Matthew Parsons

Microsoft’s artificial intelligence technology, recently supercharged by ChatGPT, is applied to a range of fields, from scientific research to product design.

It’s also being applied to one of the most tedious jobs on the planet, expense filing, as American Express and Navan (formerly TripActions) begin adopting the technology to enhance payments.

American Express on Thursday revealed it is partnering with Microsoft to develop a new solution to “simplify expense reporting for employees and businesses, using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.”

It will feature a “decision engine” that categorizes transactions and assigns risk scores based on transaction details, the company’s travel and expense policy, and the traveler’s purchase and payment history on their American Express card.

“Imagine a future where the majority of your expenses are simply auto-submitted and auto-approved, requiring no manual intervention,” said said Gunther Bright, executive vice president, global commercial services at American Express.

Unlike most expense platforms, this new iteration can sit on top of other expense systems. American Express will first pilot it on Microsoft’s employees by integrating it into the tech company’s internal expense system. Then it wants to offer it to its other corporate clients, allowing them to overlay it on their existing expense management tools.

American Express is also part-owner of American Express Global Business Travel, which offers the neo and neo1 spend management platforms. The spokesperson said there was no impact on Amex GBT’s own offerings.

The push to make expenses easier and more accurate by automating them makes sense. Companies process an average of 51,000 expense reports each year, and on average spend half a million dollars and 3,000 hours correcting errors annually, according to the Global Business Travel Association.

And one in five business travelers would rather pour lemon juice on a cut than file an expense report, a survey from software company Banyan recently found. A third are willing to pay someone $50 to do an expense report for them.

As a result, travel agencies are continually looking to evolve.

While American Express is working with Microsoft, which has invested in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, a spokesperson told Skift it is open and equipped to adopt any technology that will add value to the tool, but it has not specifically explored OpenAI so far.

However travel and expense management company Navan this week said it has integrated the so-called generative artificial intelligence as part of its rebrand. It claims it is the first travel company to do so.

“When a traveler leaves a hotel, they no longer need to wait at the desk for an itemized