to automate the expense management process fully, the reality is a little different. “You can take a picture of a receipt, have the system get the vendor name and loca- tion using optical character recognition and, if it is a hotel, the check-in and out dates, and it will say instantly whether it is in or out of policy. We do that incredibly efficiently. Others have gone along that road; most do not do it in real-time.” The Certify system then takes that data and matches it to the corporate card infor- mation which is automatically brought into the system. “We fully automated that,” says Neveu, “so on the first of the month we can say, ‘Bob, your expense report is ready for you to review.’” One interesting area of AI for Certify is in benchmarking. “One of the big chal- lenges for first-time adopters is expense policy,” says Neveu. “We have millions of users and billions of dollars of receipts and we have the ability to anonymise and share that back with our customers in the form of benchmarking policy and tools.” Dan Fitzgerald, Traveldoo’s chief product officer, says that AI’s promise is in making good decisions around multi- dimensional problems that a person would struggle to manage in a reasonable time. “AI definitely has the potential to make things easier,” he says. “But the hype is ahead of the reality right now.” The goal at the end of the road, believes Fitzgerald, is the ‘CEO experience’, where
the traveller would literally have to do nothing to submit an expense claim. “No one likes doing expenses,” he says. AI coming into expense management will be a gradual process, he believes. “The successful companies will be those that build tools and can test scenarios more effectively than others – and be wrong faster than anyone else,” he says. Fyle, which launched in early 2016, is an automated expense management platform aimed at SMEs that puts AI at the heart of its platform. Its marketing tagline says: “We automate your expense reports, so you can do better things.” Yashwanth Madhusudan, Fyle’s co-
founder, says the idea came from his own frustrations as a frequent business travel- ler. “Over five years, my travel increased a lot and the time I spent on travel-related expenses increased. I had a feeling that I lost a lot of my own money.” Fyle works in a different way to many other expense management systems. Its key product is an AI-powered plug-in that
works with Gmail, and it has recently rolled one out for Outlook 365 – the first such product approved by Microsoft. Users install the plug-in and then click on emails to identify them as expense-related; the system then extracts the information from the unstructured data in the email. For receipt images captured through its mobile app, Fyle compares the image to a large database of standard receipts from which it knows where to find the relevant information, such as the merchant, date, location and amount. For images not in the database, the system uses machine- learning to make informed guesses, which get better over time.
There is some attachment by tax authori- ties around the world to paper receipts, but even this sector is seeing some liber- alisation, says Madhusudan. He cites those till receipts that only last a few days before fading so badly they are unreadable. “Tax authorities are also cognisant of this,” he says. “All they really want is a verifiable trail of when the expense was incurred, what it was for, who approved it and when it was paid out.” “Receipts will disappear,” says Travel-
doo’s Fitzgerald. “Why do you have to carry around a receipt?” But, he says, AI currently has a problem with trust. Do you trust a system enough to take a photo of your receipt and then
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