By Marne Martin
As we usher in a new era of intelligent collaboration, like we saw at Davos 2025 where I had the privilege of speaking on opening day, AI and data are transforming essential finance processes once laden with inefficiency and tedium. Time-consuming and manual tasks create real challenges for travel, expense and payment processes in many organizations. But within that lies tremendous opportunity for transformation.
Today, the digital economy makes up about 16% of global GDP, but has the greatest impact for growth in the next 3 - 5 years regardless of an economy’s stage of maturity, as well as the ability to put technology to work to solve or lessen the challenges we’re facing. In fact, 40% of the global workforce is exposed to AI in some form, but two-thirds of it is for fun or entertainment, not applied use, where through its maximum potential, we can predict and deliver true business and economic value.
I'm filled with optimism because the future is here today.
Empowering Female Leaders
Bringing this year’s Davos theme to life —"Collaboration in the Intelligent Age" — requires visionary leadership, particularly from women leading the charge in finance and technology. Female CEOs and finance leaders have an important opportunity to champion these advancements, demonstrating how intelligent solutions can empower teams, improve efficiency, and drive innovation while increasing collaboration across industries. We need women and men working together to continue investing in job creation and meaningful diversity measures.
At Emburse, we believe the age of manual expense reports and cumbersome approval workflows is over. Our expertise in expense management covers all aspects of what needs to be paid and managed by an organization whether the spend is corporate, employee or discretionary. We also believe that the first movers in this space who sought to duplicate paper-based processes are antiquated, holding finance departments back from being more innovative and having less manual work (even as we understand that some businesses are still moving away from paper or manual processes). We are in the next wave of driving automation through AI and the use of data to bring new levels of digital transformation to businesses and their finance departments to partner and play a part in the wider ecosystem with ERPs, banks, card providers, and others.
In addition to this, the payments landscape has become a congested and confusing place. There are too many payment vendors not embedded into B2B finance workflows to drive efficiency, accuracy, and savings to make payment part of end-to-end, procure-to-pay workflows.
Let’s take a glimpse into what this transformation looks like and its profound implications for organizations worldwide.
A Bold Vision: Time Is Our Most Valuable Currency
Emburse has a bold vision for the future. As we help businesses deliver incremental improvements in the near term, our mission is to lead a paradigm shift in how organizations around the world operate when it comes to their finance departments, leveraging data insights. Expense reports are dead and manual processes are relics of the past. We believe the most valuable resource for organizations today is time and managing their expenses and working capital to maximize growth and returns.
Picture a world where manual expense reports are a thing of the past and we can ensure compliant spend, best price matching to PO, policy, or based on need, as well as real-time checks through incurring and paying for business travel or other expense types. This is while ensuring a positive and insightful user experience for finance staff and employees, some of whom will also be business travelers. This is not a distant dream; it is the reality Emburse delivers to its customers every day whether an expense is incurred by an employee or against a vendor. With the data in place, reports, analytics, and ERP postings are accurate and real-time, enhancing spend visibility and control. This also lays the foundation for our proprietary and secure large language models, which help prevent fraud, ensure compliance, and deliver near-perfect accuracy.
Let’s consider the basic impact before we start bringing in game-changing enhancements like AI, automation, and real-time analysis:
- 30 Minutes Back Per Week for Every Employee: Employees no longer waste time filling out manual expense reports. Instead, they scan receipts while traveling, and by the time they land, their reports are ready via one-click submission. Learn how we gained time back for our customer Slalom here.
- 30 Minutes Saved for Every Admin: Administrative professionals are freed from the painful grind of approving reports. Approvals happen automatically as long as the traveler is compliant. See how we maximized time for our customer Databricks here.
- Immediate Reimbursement and Real-Time Updates: Payments are processed instantly, whether to the employee’s card or directly to their bank account. ERP systems are automatically updated, ensuring real-time budget visibility and eliminating out-of-policy spending. Read our customer Jotun’s success story here.
Unleashing the Power of AI, Automation and Data
At Emburse, we believe technology should give time back to employees and finance teams. We are applying the latest in AI technology to dramatically transform and improve the lives of business travelers and finance teams globally, freeing up more time for meaningful, strategic work. AI-powered automation in Emburse solutions eliminates repetitive tasks and streamlines workflows.
This transformation is powered by:
- Comprehensive Data Capture: Airfare, hotels, car rentals, rail, and transfers are captured at the time of reservation and invoicing. Meals and entertainment expenses are tracked via card integration and receipt scanning. Even miscellaneous expenses, like mileage and airport transfers, are calculated automatically.
- Unified Payment Data: All payment information is merged and synchronized, offering comprehensive visibility into spending.
- Advanced AI Models: Emburse’s Engineering and Product teams are implementing the latest AI models to drive our systems toward near-perfect accuracy. A standout example is our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) transcription capabilities, which can process any type of document—itemized receipts, hotel folios, or invoices—from over 170 currencies and across 120 countries. By constantly refining these AI models, we are creating a future where manual data entry becomes virtually nonexistent. From here, we can continue to expand the use and nature of predictive insights that are either actioned automatically or with SME oversight, allowing our customers to start influencing the performance of their own data and business goals.
- Fraud Detection: Identifying fraud in all phases of expense, invoice, payments and cards. Detection accuracy will continue to increase as AI models become more and more intelligent leading to real-time alerts and virtually eliminating false positives.
- Audit as a Service: Expenses and invoices can be automatically and almost instantly audited ensuring compliance to policies by leveraging Emburse’s machine learning based audit capabilities which can also be supplemented with a human review if desired.
- Real-Time Insights and Approvals: ERP systems are updated in real-time, providing budget visibility and spend control. This real-time data consolidation offers deep analysis for cost savings, out-of-policy spend prevention, and streamlined approvals.
A Global Call to Action
Imagine the collective impact of giving millions of employees and administrators around the world 30 minutes or more back every week. The possibilities are unlocked when finance teams and approvers can spend more time on strategic initiatives rather than reconciling reports. Collaboration in the intelligent age means rethinking the status quo and embracing bold, forward-thinking solutions.
At Emburse, we’re not just imagining the future; we’re building it. By applying the latest technology, we’re transforming the lives of travelers, admins, and financial professionals—enabling them to focus on what matters most.
We believe “Collaboration In The Intelligent Age” transcends silos, improving spend visibility, connectivity, and decision-making across organizations. Emburse is proud to empower global teams to prioritize innovation, strategy, and collaboration.
Together, let’s redefine how organizations manage expenses, giving time and energy back to employees and teams to do extraordinary work. Let’s work together to build a smarter, more connected world where technology enables people to spend time on what truly inspires them.
Stay tuned for more in the "Intelligent Age” blog series and other exciting updates from Emburse!