AI agents for Travel and Expense. How AI Agents Drive Business Innovation

Agentic AI is the most significant leap in enterprise automation yet—moving beyond detection and generative responses to autonomous planning, orchestration, and execution. Through Joule, SAP Concur's AI agents eliminate manual work, connect business functions, and equip leaders with real-time insights. This whitepaper charts the evolution, the technology, and the path forward.

What is Agentic AI- and Why Does It Matter for Business?

Agentic AI initiates, plans, orchestrates, and executes multi-step processes without a human prompt. It draws on LLMs and machine learning to make decisions, coordinate agents or software tools, and adapt as new information arrives—moving well beyond what generative AI could do alone.

Joule: The AI Connecting SAP’s Ecosystem

Joule is SAP's enterprise-wide AI solution, embedded across SAP Concur, SAP ERP, procurement, HR, logistics, and sales. It acts as a conversational assistant, action executor, and orchestrator—coordinating specialised AI agents and reaching beyond the SAP ecosystem when needed.

How Do AI Agents Solve Travel and Expense Pain Points?

SAP Concur's AI agents target the highest-friction tasks in T&E and finance, each handling a focused scope coordinated by Joule:

• Booking Agent — Books policy-compliant trips from a plain-language request, factoring in business traveller preferences and corporate policy.

• Expense Automation Agent — Starts expense reports as purchases appear, so employees review and approve instead of building from scratch.

• Receipt Analysis Agent — Fills missing data by cross-referencing vendor names, itineraries, and travel history.

• Expense Pre-Submit Audit Agent — Catches compliance issues, duplicates, and mismatches before submission.

Rethinking AI ROI: New Technology Requires New Metrics

Finance leaders recognise AI gains, yet half struggle to quantify the return. New KPIs are needed—time saved, compliance improvements, and the correlation of travel spend with outcomes. As Joule generates richer data across T&E, ROI becomes easier to compute.

What Makes SAP Concur’s AI Responsible and Trustworthy?

SAP Concur operates under SAP's ethical AI framework: human-centred, transparent, and fully auditable. Every AI action is explainable, users are notified when AI is active, and humans retain supervisory control throughout. The goal is not to replace people—it is to give them greater agency, better data, and space to focus on work that matters.

Ready to see what agentic AI can do for your business?

Read the full whitepaper to explore the technology, the agents, and the roadmap.