In the concluding part of the 4-part series of the blog, let us find out if there any opportunity to raise the efficiency of expense management and auditing levels and increase compliance rates? AI opens up its full potential when it comes to driving policy improvements. One of which is that there are specific violations that actually make up rational behavior: the company should update those parts of its business travel policy. Also, any expert reporting system that is AI-driven should help adjust the company’s travel policy suitably and update it as and when needed. For example, if there are no hotels in California that are available for less than $300, the default travel policy adjustment should reflect that in California hotel fares will be higher.
Such automatic travel policy adjustments that are aided by AI will ensure that travelers wanting to book a hotel in California in excess of $300 fare will not get flagged needlessly, and the travel expenditure reimbursement process is not stalled or slowed in any way. Whilst Dynamic Policy is still in infancy, adoption of AI in automatic policy adjustment is the way ahead.
Getting Buy-In:
Making legacy clients migrate to new tech stacks and process is tricky biz; therefore, offering client opt-outs from technology is important. It will be up to the travel manager to take the call whether they want to adopt it. If you think the advantages of AI-powered auditing and automation are obvious for corporations whose management team has to process thousands of expenditure reports, think again. It is the SMEs that are mostly manpower-and resource-stricken, which require AI-powered travel management tools to audit expense reports.
Some companies believe in partly outsourcing these functions to third-party TMCs only to realize later that AI-powered travel management apps are actually much intuitive and smarter in delivering the intended function. The best-automated expense reporting system would incorporate the client’s entire expense audit and reimbursement workflow. An ecosystem that thrives on automated expense tool allows travel managers simply to take a look at trends and anomalies that repeatedly surface and ensure that behavior changes are a reality rather than human intervention in every instance. AI is already a happening phenomenon. AI-based travel management apps will definitely change the way decisions are based as regard appropriate misuse of travel funds and expose fraudulent expenses far better than all manual processes put together.