SAP Concur Launches AI Tools for Expense Approvals and Travel Leakage

SAP Concur has rolled out a suite of artificial intelligence-powered features targeting finance teams and travel administrators, the company announced Monday. The new capabilities include automated approval assistance, expense-policy benchmarking, virtual card management functionality, and a tool designed to identify out-of-policy travel spending.

The leakage-reporting tool represents one of the first products to emerge from a 2025 partnership between SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel. That alliance integrated travel, expense, and marketplace information across both platforms, creating visibility into booking patterns that previously remained siloed. Travel leakage—spending that falls outside corporate travel policies—can account for more than 30 percent of bookings at certain companies, according to SAP Concur.

Before this integration, such expenditure remained largely hidden from Concur's systems because the transaction data resided within Amex GBT's platform. The new reporting capability now provides travel managers with comprehensive oversight of booking behavior, combining datasets the two companies could not previously share.

While most of the announced features apply artificial intelligence to tools already in SAP Concur's portfolio, the leakage-detection system breaks new ground by merging previously separate data sources. The AI-assisted approval manager automates portions of the expense-review process, though questions remain about the system's accuracy in distinguishing legitimate policy violations from false alerts.

SAP Concur has not disclosed timelines for expanding its virtual card management beyond Mastercard to include Visa, nor has it specified when the feature will become available to customers outside the United States. The company also has not clarified whether the leakage tool will eventually supersede its existing TripLink product, which tracks bookings made outside corporate channels.