By Ken Ringdahl, CTO and John Brusk, VP, Data Science
The recent excitement around DeepSeek has reignited discussions about the future of AI-powered business solutions and the level of investment required to achieve success. While the industry chases the next big thing, Emburse has quietly been executing a smarter – more sustainable and future-proof – AI strategy, purpose-built for travel and expense management.
Unlike generic AI approaches that consume massive resources with minimal customization, we have spent years optimizing our AI solutions to provide real customer value—delivering cost-effectiveness, data privacy, and sustainability—all without sacrificing performance.
Smarter AI, built for results
The current era of Generative AI emerged with the introduction of GPT 3 in late 2022. Since that time, many software companies have rushed to include AI features and functionality into their products to simply check a box and show adoption of modern AI technology even if it did not necessarily deliver significant customer value. Emburse, on the other hand, took a different path. We focused on outcomes, not just features, ensuring that AI-driven automation in spend management was purposeful and effective. Instead of adopting a "me-too" approach, we built an AI ecosystem that is:
- Outcome-Driven and Purpose-Built – Optimized specifically for travel and expense management.
- Cost-Effective and Future-Proof – Designed to seamlessly swap LLM engines as technology evolves.
- Highly Efficient and Sustainable – Avoiding unnecessary GPU consumption while delivering top-tier performance.
Open-source flexibility with proprietary enhancements
Emburse’s AI services leverage best-in-class open-source LLMs while maintaining complete control over the process. Unlike closed AI systems, our approach ensures flexibility, security and continuous optimization. We can fine-tune models with proprietary data and adapt quickly to new advancements. This level of flexibility and control enables:
- Adaptive AI – We can swap out AI engines easily, ensuring we always utilize the most effective, efficient models.
- Proprietary AI Training – We train our own models using proprietary expense data, enriched with human and GenAI-assisted labeling to fill in missing information such as the expected action or answer from a particular task being automated.
- Targeted AI Solutions – Instead of relying on bloated, generic models, we develop domain-specific solutions that enhance T&E workflows.
Maximizing efficiency with smarter AI training
The race for AI dominance has led many companies to blindly consume excessive computing resources. At Emburse, we’ve chosen a more sustainable and scalable approach:
- Optimizing Training – Instead of chasing NVIDIA HGX H100s or HGX H200s, we optimize training with a single 40GB GPU machine.
- Efficient AI – We implement Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) training, significantly reducing model weights while maintaining accuracy.
- Smarter AI Models – Our models are purpose-built for specific tasks, ensuring high performance with minimal resource consumption.
- Cut Processing Costs – We quantize our trained LLMs down to 4-bit, reducing latency and inference costs without sacrificing accuracy. Quantization is the process of reducing unnecessary precision in what the model learns.
What does this mean for businesses? Faster, more cost-effective AI that delivers high-impact results without the waste. AI-Powered Financial Intelligence. Emburse AI goes beyond automation-it delivers intelligent, proactive insights. Our AI agents operate autonomously within an agentic architecture, meaning they can:
- Interact with their environment to gather and process financial data.
- Utilize software tools for complex financial analysis and expense optimization.
- Collaborate with other AI agents to streamline tasks such as document transcription, audit and risk assessment, spend classification, and general ledger allocation.
- Leverage advanced insights and robust data to make system-wide recommendations that would take many days or months to manually determine, if even possible.
This modular approach, inclusive of an agentic AI architecture, ensures that as AI capabilities evolve, our system evolves with it—allowing businesses to stay ahead in spend optimization.
Privacy and security: Built-in, not bolted on
As a US-based company with cloud infrastructure in the US, Canada, and Europe, we take security and privacy seriously. Unlike solutions that rely on third-party AI services, our use of open-source models—fine-tuned on our proprietary platform—ensures that:
- Customer data remains secure-never sent to external AI processors.
- Privacy compliance is built-in, with regional controls that meet global data protection standards.
- Full AI governance remains in our hands, allowing us to continuously improve accuracy while maintaining strict data protections.
Beyond hype: Emburse AI in action
While the market has been captivated by DeepSeek’s concepts, Emburse has already been delivering real-world value with AI prioritizing efficiency, privacy, and sustainability. Rather than relying on massive, generalized models, we have taken an intentional, purpose-built approach with:
- Customer-focused AI – We prioritize real business value, not just AI experimentation.
- Plug and play adaptability – Our AI evolves seamlessly with the latest technology
- Responsible AI practices – Sustainable, secure and performance-driven automation.
As the established innovator in travel and expense management software, Emburse keeps ahead of what’s next so you can uncover savings across your spend. We don’t lead the future through hype, but through AI-driven innovation that delivers measurable impact. By combining proprietary data with open-source flexibility and cutting-edge efficiency techniques, we’re demonstrating that smarter AI is the key to a more sustainable, secure, and effective future for business travel and expense management.
Learn how you can leverage GenAI and automation for increased efficiency and faster visibility into spend by visiting https://www.emburse.com/platform/emburse-ai.