Travel and Expense
Joule Agents: Bringing the Future of T&E to SAP Concur Users
SAP Concur is leading the effort to build more automated, smarter travel and expense (T&E) experiences. Our vision for the future is a world where travel and expenses practically manage themselves. But the technology supporting this vision is more than just automation. The future of T&E will be powered by intelligent, goal-oriented systems that proactively take action, make decisions, and guide users through complex tasks.
We are putting AI to work, bringing T&E experiences of the future to customers faster than you might expect. For instance, we’ve introduced hotel itemization enhancements for ExpenseIt, using AI to increase accuracy and reduce time spent manually entering data. Request Assistant in Concur Request uses AI to estimate business trip costs, streamlining planning and saving employees’ valuable time. And, we’re introducing the Joule copilot experience within Concur Travel & Expense, with features like the Booking Agent, Interactive Expense Helper and Conversational Help Search that help users book compliant business travel, create and manage their expenses, and get answers to their questions without creating support tickets, all through natural language conversation with Joule.
Joule from SAP
Joule is an AI copilot, grounded in your business data, that can assist users in SAP and non-SAP applications. Available at no cost to all customers, the base Joule AI copilot uses gen AI to converse with users in natural language.
But AI is also shifting from tools that respond to prompts to assistants that anticipate needs and drive outcomes—also known as agentic AI. Joule is infused with AI agents to proactively support users in every cloud application they use while automating complex processes.
These intelligent systems don’t just generate content but act with purpose. They can reason, plan, and take actions on behalf of users to achieve specific goals. You don’t just converse with Joule Agents; you can engage with them to autonomously execute tasks or source insights to support your business.
Joule Agents in SAP Concur solutions
We’re launching our first Joule agents within SAP Concur solutions, unlocking insights, minimizing risk, and empowering smarter, confident T&E decisions at scale.
The Booking Agent in Concur Travel can help every traveler transform into a confident, policy-savvy trip planner. Capabilities include:
- Conversational booking guidance, responding to natural language queries (e.g., “Book me a flight to Paris Tuesday morning”) and generating compliant itineraries instantly.
- Policy-aware personalization, delivering options that match traveler preferences while adhering to company rules, helping employees stay in policy without thinking about it.
- Integrated expense context, surfacing pricing breakdowns, travel class justification, and spend estimates in real time so there are no surprises during expense submission.
The Receipt Analysis Agent in ExpenseIt goes beyond basic receipt scanning by identifying and automatically completing missing information. Capabilities include:
- Enhanced data inference: The Receipt Analysis Agent can infer missing receipt information—such as location, vendor, or expense type—by analyzing surrounding contextual clues and user-specific data. This advancement represents a significant leap forward in augmenting traditional data capture methods.
- Precision using historical data: By leveraging user history, ExpenseIt can predict expense types with higher accuracy, refining the process as it learns from past submissions.
- Advanced calculations: Even when receipt totals are missing or difficult to decipher, ExpenseIt sums up the line items to find the receipt total.
The Meeting Location Planner Agent in Concur Travel will empower users to solve the “Where should we meet?” problem without the spreadsheet. Capabilities include:
- Smart location optimization, autonomously analyzing attendee locations, flight options,
- cost, travel time, and sustainability to recommend the most efficient meeting city.
- Policy-conscious planning, applying company-specific travel policies to ensure hotel and flight recommendations meet budget, class of service, and preferred supplier rules.
- Multivariate scenario modeling, instantly comparing multiple city options, and presenting tradeoffs in cost and time, so planners can make fast, informed decisions.
- Tailored group preferences, accepting custom inputs (e.g., airline preference, maximum travel time) and adjusting recommendations accordingly, with no need for manual filtering.
- End-to-end meeting setup, going beyond location suggestion to recommend compliant hotels and generate budget estimates, empowering faster approvals and bookings.
The Expense Report Validation Agent in Concur Expense will help employees submit accurate, compliant expense reports, without the back and forth. Capabilities include:
- Guided report completion, walking users through the final steps of expense report submission, flagging missing or incomplete entries and prompting for quick resolution.
- In-workflow policy clarity, explaining alerts and compliance issues in plain language and helping users resolve them directly within the report, eliminating guesswork and delays.
- Smart accuracy checks, proactively detecting common errors and missing data, prompting users to confirm or correct entries, to boost first-pass approval rates and reduce rework.
- Frictionless efficiency, streamlining the reporting process, saving time and effort for employees while reducing the burden on finance teams.
With more than a decade of experience delivering embedded AI, combined with over 30 years of T&E expertise, and strong commitment to data privacy, cybersecurity, and a human-centered approach, SAP Concur is uniquely positioned to apply AI in ways that no other T&E company can—unlocking even more value for our customers with the power to move business forward.
Learn more about Joule and request a demo here.
