Travel and expense management technology specialist Concur has released its latest product updates to help travelers and the travel management community control spend.
Key elements of the updates, launched at its Fusion event in the United States this week, include enhancing Concur Travel, a partnership with Mastercard and further automation in Concur Expense.
Chris Juneau, head of market strategy at SAP Concur, said the updates were about “delivering the right experience at the right time” as well as the right content, whether that be around new distribution capability (NDC) developments, sustainability initiatives or something else.
He flagged the collaboration capabilities enabled by the integration with Microsoft Teams as well as its Request Integration, which aims to make the approval process more efficient, as updates likely to make an impact on the traveler experience in Concur Travel.
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Last September the company announced its new booking experience in Concur Travel, which was available via Sabre in the U.S. initially. Juneau said coverage since had been added to the United Kingdom, Canada and Mexico with the system also expected to be accessible through Amadeus in the second quarter.
He also touched on the partnership with Mastercard, which improves compliance by providing authorization data in real time, the vision of making expense reports “write themselves” and the role of artificial intelligence.
Juneau said AI would help with the trade-off companies often had to make in the past between control and compliance and a good user experience.
“So there’s the opportunity with AI both across travel and expense and across data, plus what we’re doing with Mastercard, so now those trade-offs won’t be as severe.”
Generative AI is also being used more widely across the business including for intelligent cost estimates to help with trip planning within Concur Request as well in updates to the ExpenseIt app.