Top 5 Business Challenges You Didn’t Know AI Could Help With
Advancing processes, policies, and procedures are primary goals when developing a business to run better. Evolving so quickly means that business challenges often arise, and employees are left to sort through the changes. This is even more prevalent today in the age of big data and the rapid advancement of technology. Playing this never-ending game of “catch up” forces employees to handle redundant, often boring tasks like organizing data. It is no question as employees in business, and humans in this world, that we crave to solve a variety of complex of problems. Frustrated and uninspired from the day’s work, employees ask themselves, “Is business meant to run this way?”
Running Better with Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic that all industries are buzzing about. Why shouldn’t they be? It’s already impacting us in ways like:
- Automating and improving complex analytical tasks
- Looking at data in real-time
- Increasing efficiency and accuracy
- Discovering patterns
- Adapting through learning algorithms
These powerful capabilities of AI enable businesses to think about solving business challenges differently. Besides managing exploding amounts of data, AI is helping tackle business areas like financial management, employee performance, regulation and compliance, and customer service. At SAP Concur, we’re striving to help solve some of these business challenges and transform expense management.
Transforming Expense Management with AI
Mastering expense management is essential to running efficiently. Making the most out of your budget matters and with AI to help, it’s a whole lot easier.
1. Increased expense report reliability
When it comes to expense management, it’s important to handle the process with a level of diligence and care. But did you know that Business Travel News (BTN) reported less than 20% of expenses go through proper auditing? Organizations can leverage an AI powered audit solution that can:
- Automatically checks 100% of expense reports
- Reduce expense report errors by 60%
- Reduce auditing time by as much as 90%
- Spot accidents vs. malicious intent
2. Reduce fraud and risk
Besides expense report reliability, reducing fraud and risk is a major problem area in business. Citing the Association of Fraud Examiners, Oversight Systems president and CEO Patrick Taylor states in an article from BTN, “If someone is committing fraud on an expense report, there’s a 75.6% chance they’re engaged in occupational fraud.”
Organizations need a solution that limits fraud by closely analyzing employee receipts for fraudulent behavior and expense violations. With the help of AI technology, you’ll be able to automatically spot these top five expense violations:
- Disallowed and personal spend
- Unverifiable receipts
- Personal credit card usage
- Disallowed merchants
- Travel add-ons
AI is going to catch on as people realize AI apps are able to review and make those decisions around inappropriate, misuse or fraudulent expenses far better than what those managers can do. ~ AppZen CEO, Anant Kale
3. Gain control of regulatory compliance
Regularly automating expense reports provides organizations a higher level of transparency and visibility into employee spend. It’s important to catch reporting errors before reimbursement or facing government fines. An AI-powered auditing solution can analyze external resources like the internet and social media to quickly verify compliance laws within government regulations and company policies.
4. Policy changes? No problem.
Companies also need the ability to stay updated with evolving company policies, which AI can help with. Taylor shares more about policies and accidents in an article from BTN: “A quarter of travelers commit offenses but aren’t considered high risk; their violations may be honest mistakes or owe to unfamiliarity with their companies’ travel policies.”
Taylor goes on explain that, “Data amassed from AI reviews of expense reports could reveal that certain violations actually constitute rational behavior; the company could consider updating those parts of its travel policy, such as allowing ride-hailing suppliers like Uber and Lyft.”
No matter the case, AI can help to recognize mistakes and to later be reviewed for possible policy updates.
5. Boost your employee experience
Manually reviewing expense reports isn’t only slow but is prone to human error and exhaustion. The work is boring, and employees would rather not do it. AI can assist to boost employee productivity and satisfaction by taking redundant tasks off their hands. “AI is going to catch on as people realize AI apps are able to review and make those decisions around inappropriate, misuse or fraudulent expenses far better than what those managers can do,” states AppZen CEO, Anant Kale in an article from BTN.
Plus, with AI around to help, employees can stay more focused on the tasks and conversations that matter, rather than keeping the system up-to-date.
Reduce company spend with Concur Detect
Concur Detect by AppZen applies machine learning to audit 100% of expense reports, before reimbursement occurs. Using artificial intelligence and ML, Concur Detect by AppZen validates whether expenses are legitimate and accurate by cross-checking them within seconds against hundreds of external data sources. Concur Detect by AppZen is integrated with Concur Expense, enabling seamless, automatic processing of low-risk expenses with high-risk reports flagged on the dashboard for review and alerts sent real-time.
Are you relying on a manual process to audit every single expense? Contact us and see how Concur Detect can automate your auditing process to help with fraud and compliance issues.
