As companies pan into the new year, budget planning for 2025 comes along.
SAP Concur enumerates its travel and expense predictions for the year ahead amid the rise of artificial intelligence and developments like the technology’s use in predictive analytics for spend management, and auto population of expense reports with data from corporate cards.
The five predictions are:
1. Continued investment in digital systems and security infrastructure
Companies in 2025 will invest in innovative new solutions such as process automation and generative AI to support growth. However, as digital estates grow and businesses incorporate new systems to streamline T&E processes, the risks associated with data and system breaches rise.
Pressure to compete will leave businesses and customers vulnerable. Today, more organisations than ever experience cybersecurity breaches, putting personal information at risk.
It’s a delicate balancing act to respond quickly to the demands of internal and external stakeholders without disregarding security concerns. Investment in tech innovation and security infrastructure will be top priorities in 2025, as firms compete to provide greater customer value while minimising risk.
2. A return to the office puts pressure on budgets to go further
As employees return to the office in droves, we expect business travel volume to increase. And with inflation slowing, businesses have an opportunity to extract more value from travel investments.
But leaders are cautious. In 2025, pressure will mount for financial controllers to get more out of T&E budgets, ensuring minimal risk to the overall business posture.
The result is a bolstered mandate for compliance and visibility. For example, T&E may be increasingly managed by one platform, ensuring policies are consistently applied as more traveller book trips and submit expenses—protecting against costly mistakes, fraud, and policy breaches.
3. Expense reports become exception reports
As the hype settles, individual job roles are defining their most valuable practical applications for AI. Repeatable tasks such as validating transactions for compliance will become increasingly automated in 2025, reducing the time managers spend reviewing individual expense reports.
Instead, ‘trusted’ transactions may never even land in an expense report. They will be replaced with exception reports, which only highlight deviations from the business’ standard T&E policies.
Automations will handle mundane tasks and help travel managers deliver in-depth audits with ease. In turn, this will give reviewers greater capacity to inspect expenses, identify fraud, and ensure no error goes unchecked.
4. Employees show a healthy scepticism in AI
While 2024 promised AI-literate businesses a host of transformative benefits, 2025 will see the tech treated with a sensible level of scepticism and thoughtfulness.
According to the 2024 SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey, 95% of business travellers would consider using AI-powered automation to support their tasks.
For now, however, AI will be seen as an assistant helping to source recommendations and identify expense anomalies, rather than a one-stop solution for booking travel or submitting expense reports.
Use cases such as pre-trip approvals and itinerary building are bringing benefits. But rather than going all in on AI, business travellers and travel managers will be tentatively exploring the workflows with the largest returns in 2025.
One area that’s often overlooked is travel research, or the time spent by employees searching geographies, identifying the best ground transport, and finding out local payment methods. AI can assist with these tasks, and truly give staff back their time for daily duties.
5. Demand grows for improved user experiences
With business travel on the rise, traveller expectations will continue to increase.
In 2025, we anticipate greater demand for real-time updates on disruptions. This can help address the effects of extreme weather events and geopolitical conflicts, which are increasingly influencing business travel decisions. With employer duty of care under a magnifying lens, travellers expect greater levels of support through T&E systems.
Following years of buzz around AI and digital innovation, 2025 will be the year of practical implementation. Organisations will plan how to stay competitive with their new T&E investments, all while making provisions to protect data, security, and their bottom line.
The critical piece here is to take the initial step, for example, by engaging SaaS solutions for their horizontal scalability, as many APAC organisations have done. For such firms, integrated T&E is critical. This means the ability to add things like duty of care providers beyond basic expense, as the company scales.
