Two of the big questions around artificial intelligence are how it
SeatGeek is in the midst of an IT upgrade to automate how it manages staff travel and expense reporting, payments and compliance, and it has noticed immediate changes in workloads. In the past six months since updating its travel and expense systems with AI-powered technology, SeatGeek has reduced work on expense management and payouts to one hour per week from 20 hours before.
"AI tools help employees spend their time better. They're not filling out expense reports and there's more accurate data for the finance team," said Teddy Collins, vice president of finance at SeatGeek.
SeatGeek is using AI to replace types of work as opposed to replacing actual workers or changing
Tech ticket
Over the past eight years, SeatGeek has expanded from a consumer-focused business that handled ticket sales for sporting events and concerts; it now has business-to-business offerings in the mix. It has partnered with more than 1,000 ticket brokers, extending the needs of its staff to travel and make remote purchases that feed into the company's T&E management system.
SeakGeek also enables spectators to upload tickets to its platform for secondary market sales. Other businesses include a European operation that sells and manages tickets for third parties on a white-label basis for partners. SeatGeek is the merchant of record for all of these transactions, requiring it to manage payments for consumers and ticket brokers, as well as payroll, travel and entertainment, and procurement payments for its own staff.
The company's expansion has also boosted its headcount from fewer than 100 in 2015 to more than 1,000 today. "We have to do more with less in terms of managing staff travel, and the business has become more complex with more employees," Collins said.
The earlier process for expense management required manual coding by the accounting department. The upgrade enables the department to preauthorize a travel/entertainment budget to improve preventative management. An expense approval module determines if a receipt is required for reporting, which Brex can then automatically generate
SeatGeek uses a platform called Brex Empower. Empower uses natural-language AI features to answer questions on budgets, staff spending patterns, vendor trends and other data related to staff and corporate expenses.
"Employees produce and submit their own budgets for trips … we do thousands of trips per year and we're now able to get much better visibility," Collins siad.
Crazy data
The fintech
"Given the amount of data that comes out of corporate expense is crazy, we were investing in tech to manage that even before AI became sexy again," said Karandeep Anand, who was named Brex's first president in late 2023 after spending two years as chief product officer. Anand worked in B2B product development at Microsoft and Meta for more than 20 years before joining Brex.
Generative AI refers to a form of AI that uses advanced language processing to produce original content. It's part of a wave of investment in AI, both to tap the newer forms of AI and to find new uses for existing AI.
"Gen AI is being hyped everywhere," Anand said, adding that a major early use is managing the vast amount of information that surrounds disparate payments for reporting, accounting or compliance purposes. "For example, covering regulations from country to country is hard. You have to understand the local context in each area, or how to do business in different countries. Having gen AI to help understand that context makes it easier."
The power of gen AI is it can interpret language on documentation such as receipts or orders, and aid teams that sift through expense records to track spending and ensure compliance, according to Anand.
"Gen AI can understand a receipt in any language," Anand said "It can spot different types of win in different parts of the world. So it can detect alcohol on a receipt. Before the new tech became available, it took thousands of hand crafted search tools to do that."
If AI can boost automation for firms hoping to improve efficiency in employee expense payments, it adds an extra enticement in a sector that is already hungry for any automation it can find.
"Automated systems help minimize errors associated with manual data entry," said Albert Bodine, director of commercial and enterprise payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. "It also ensures compliance with company policies and regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of financial discrepancies or legal issues."
By automating expense management, businesses can save costs associated with paper-based processes, manual labor, and potential errors, Bodine said.
"Streamlining workflows and reducing the need for physical paperwork can result in significant cost savings over time," he said.
Bodine is finishing a report on the subject which projects opportunities for payment firms or fintechs in managing corporate employee expenses, predicting a 10% to 14% compound annual growth rate in technology from small businesses alone over the next four years.
"Automated systems can enforce company expense policies by flagging or blocking non-compliant expenses," Bodine said. "This helps maintain consistency and fairness in expense reporting across the organization."
