ChatGPT is getting all the eye as of late, but modern AI technologies have a spread of use cases beyond finally making Bing useful. One emerging trend is putting AI to work to help with the frustrating and laborious task of filing and auditing corporate expense reports. Today, Microsoft and American Express announced a deal that goals to just do that. The businesses agreed to expand their decades-long partnership to construct solutions that leverage Microsoft Cloud and AI technologies, starting with expense report management.

In line with Amex, the initial solution will leverage machine learning and AI to automate expense reporting and approvals.

This goes beyond simply learning how one can classify certain expenses, as lots of today’s tools already do. As an alternative, the brand new system will implement an AI-powered decision engine that understands the corporate’s own travel and expense (T&E) policy and the way it applies to submitted expenses. It should use that understanding together with other aspects — like the worker’s purchase and payment history — to categorize and assign a risk rating to individual transactions.

To make this work, the worker shall be prompted to snap a photograph of their receipt after paying with their Corporate Amex card. The system will then apply one among three risk scores: red, yellow or green, based on whether the expense is beneficial for automatic approval or not, or if it needs one other look. This information is passed along to the corporate’s expense management system with the receipt details attached to robotically generate reports for managers and auditors to make use of in their very own decision-making. Amex says the AI is something it built in-house — it’s not leveraging Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, as Bing is, but is using Microsoft Cloud.

Over time, the expense management system will get smarter because of machine learning. As more expenses flow through the system, it is going to improve its algorithms around what kind of expenses will be robotically approved.

Microsoft shall be the answer’s first tester and can integrate it with its own internal expense system later within the yr, American Express notes. Over time, it is going to roll out to more Amex Corporate clients and add support for more expense management tools.

While it’s not exactly ChatGPT for expense reports, if successful, the answer could save time and reduce headaches around corporate expense management.

Imagine, as a substitute of spending hours manually categorizing expenses, uploading receipts and justifying the costs, corporate employees would only must give attention to the outliers that truly required further explanation.

In fact, it stays to be seen if the answer is capable of really accomplishing this goal, as described, or if corporations will even utilize the tech when it becomes available.

Amex also isn’t the one company seeking to AI to enhance the tedious processes around expense report management. Just days ago, Palo Alto-based business-travel software maker TripActions rebranded to Navan and announced it might integrate ChatGPT into its platform for similar reasons. The corporate said its recent system would learn a user’s preferred airlines, hotels and restaurants to construct itineraries and can streamline expense reporting through its own receipt-scanning tool, amongst other things.

There’s reason, in fact, to be skeptical of those forthcoming AI solutions.

As The Atlantic recently identified, recent technologies meant to scale back worker labor inevitably just create “recent sorts of work” for people to do as a substitute. And ChatGPT’s way of confidently providing the improper answer suggests a few of that extra work may involve coping with false positives and negatives.

Plus, other firms have been leveraging AI for a while, like SAP Concur. And lots of employees would argue that Concur isn’t exactly a user-friendly system.

The timing of the announcement is suspect, as well. Amex is probably going hoping to ride on the wave of interest within the Microsoft-OpenAI deal and the ChatGPT-powered Bing to get more eyeballs on its far less exciting use case. (Unless, in fact, expense management thrills you!)

Still, AI is on its method to the broader financial services and corporate travel industry, not only expense management. In that respect, Amex isn’t necessarily getting out ahead of the market, it’s just maintaining with where it’s headed.