Travel and expense management solution provider, SAP Concur, and software company, Slack Technologies, are harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning to increase productivity, enabling clients to use natural language commands right in Slack’s team collaboration tool to file expenses and book travel quickly and easily.
Concur is now making the Concur Expense bot available in public beta trials and will soon be introducing the Concur Travel bot on Slack.
“We’re all about creating efficiencies and empowering people to do their best, most productive work. This is a perfect fit for our large enterprise clients, particularly those with infrequent users of Concur Expense who can now take actions directly in Slack,” said John Dietz, VP, Concur Labs.
Based on the success of Concur’s private beta trial last year, more robust features and functionality have been added. Now, with the expense bot users can be notified when they have an expense report to review and approve the report directly from Slack. Users can upload receipts in a Slack message to be saved in their SAP Concur account. Filing expenses can be as simple as typing a Slack message such as “expense $15 for lunch”. Requesting a summary of current expenses can be as easy as typing “expense report summary” in Slack.
Travel is slated to get a lot simpler too. To find their best flight, users will be able to type a keyword such as “search” to have the Concur Travel bot display flight search fields, which the user can filter by destination, dates, fare class, and preferred airlines, without ever leaving Slack. Once flights are selected, the bot will be able to auto-populate payment information, based on the existing credit card and loyalty program on file. Itinerary information will always be close at hand simply by typing “itinerary” or “trip details”.
How much productivity is at stake? Slack has more than six million daily active clients using more than 1000 different apps, while on a busy day in Q4 2017, SAP Concur processed more than 568,000 expense reports and Concur mobile uploaded 1.1 million receipts and booked more than 202,000 trips.
Concur signs Microchannel as ANZ reseller
Closer to home, Concur has signed an ANZ reseller partnership with business solutions and technology provider, MicroChannel, which integrates SAP Concur with a range of business systems including SAP Business One, Sage 300 and Microsoft Dynamics.
“SAP Concur is the market leader and being able to offer SAP Concur expense and invoice management products directly will help drive even deeper value between us and our customers,” said Ben Cook, national sales director, MicroChannel, which has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.
