SAP Concur has unveiled a series of AI-driven solutions, including a tool designed to make meeting planning more simple and efficient in partnership with Groupize.
Showcased at this week’s GBTA Convention in Chicago, a newly-enhanced Meeting Planning Agent streamlines the process and can help reduce accommodation costs.
Through a simple conversation with SAP’s AI solution Joule, the agent serves up recommendations for meetings of any size, flagging major events in the chosen location to avoid price spikes and availability issues before they become a problem.
Additionally, the agent can now bring Groupize hotel room block proposals directly into SAP Concur solutions, eliminating the need to track group accommodations in a separate system.
“We started bringing meetings and events into the tool six months ago through AI. This is now truly bringing in the travel element of meetings and events into an online booking tool environment, via an AI agent,” said Paul Dear, Regional Vice President – Supplier Services EMEA at SAP Concur.
“This is really exciting because it brings meetings and events into what I would call transient mainstream. Therefore, travel managers have better control, and they can then also possibly gain meetings, events into their portfolio,”
Meeting Planning Agent will be available for early adopter customers in September, with general availability planned for the fourth quarter of this year.
SAP Concur also announced a number of other new features to its online booking tool at the GBTA Convention.
Single workspace
A new AI-assisted delegates dashboard brings approval requests, travel bookings, and expense reports into a single intelligent workspace so Executive Assistants (EAs) no longer have to switch between tools, emails and profiles.
SAP Concur claims users can expect to see up to 25% reduction in hours spent resolving issues thanks to the development, which is available today for early adopter customers and is set to be generally available in the third quarter of 2026.
“An EA can have all of their people within one place, and it tells them when they wake up in the morning what’s the most important thing they’ve got to do that day,” said Dear.
“So, it might tell them that somebody’s waiting for this request, somebody hasn’t got that expense yet, they’re travelling tomorrow so have you done all of their relevant paperwork? So, therefore it improves the productivity for the EAs.”
Approvals
Tackling the complex and time-consuming approval process, SAP Concur is also rolling out a new AI-assisted approval manager which automatically highlights high-risk submissions with clear AI reasoning and surfacing AI-generated risk insights, spending trends, and approval history all in one place.
The functionality is available now for early adopter customers with general availability planned for the end of this year.
Benchmarking
Enhanced admin control is being tested and will be available in early 2027 to help travel managers compare programme performance against similar organisations.
The solution will identify improvement opportunities and share recommended actions.
Payments
AI-assisted corporate card management is simplifying how virtual card programs are created and managed.
Administrators can generate virtual card programs directly from policy documents, use natural language prompts to create approval rules, and align virtual cards to spending limits and merchant category controls from the start.
