SAP Concur: 5 travel and expense predictions for 2025

Amid the rise of AI and developments like the technology’s use in predictive analytics for spend management, and auto population of expense reports with data from corporate cards, SAP Concur is putting forth its travel and expense (T&E) predictions for 2025.

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 ever1 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.

Nearly 85% of businesses in APAC2 have reported an increase in their cyber budgets and regulations are gaining momentum. For example, in Singapore, companies can face fines of up to 10% of their local annual turnover.

2. A return to the office puts pressure on budgets to go

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.

“From 2020-2023, circumstances led to dramatically reduced travel activity and companies experienced benefits to their bottom line. Corporate travel is now recovering strongly – according to GBTA3 , the global business travel industry spending is expected to hit a record $1.48 trillion this year, with China and US the two fastest growing markets. Asia Pacific was the fastest growing region for corporate travel in 2023, expanding 36% over the year before,” said Brett Wheeldon, VP of Solutions Consulting, APAC, SAP Concur.

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 travellers4 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.

“Travel booking is the perfect use case to move away from static cumbersome input forms to a natural language conversation that has the datasets to access information such as corporate travel policies, specific event dates and even travellers’ record of travel that may alter policy rules based on frequency of travel,” - Brett Wheeldon, VP of Solutions Consulting, APAC, SAP Concur

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.

“Of course, that aggregated T&E data also provides insight into other areas APAC businesses are becoming more and more focused on, for example, what is the organisation’s travel program’s carbon footprint, and does the organisation have the tools to reduce that footprint?” remarked Wheeldon.

• 1Information Commissioner’s Office, Organisations must do more to combat the growing threat of cyber attacks
• 2PwC, 2024 Global Digital Trust Insights – Cybersecurity in Asia Pacific: Rising threats and GenAI adoption
• 3Global Business Travel Association, Global Business Travel Industry Spending Expected to Hit Record $1.48 Trillion in 2024
• 4SAP Concur, Tap into the Power of AI to Transform Your Business Travel