Making AI your spend management superpower

You’re probably already using AI in many parts of your business. You might be using it for summarising data, speeding up comms, or helping with decision-making. But when it comes to spend management, many businesses are still relying on outdated tools, manual processes, and disconnected platforms.

This creates unnecessary friction: Time lost ‌reconciling receipts, approvals stuck in inboxes, and limited visibility over where money’s actually going. AI is driving efficiency elsewhere, but spend management hasn’t kept pace, until now.

AI-powered spend management can help with smarter budgeting, proactive control, and freeing up time across your organisation. In this guide, we’ll explain how it works, what challenges it solves, and how it can transform the way your team manages expenses.

What is spend management?

Spend management refers to how an organisation tracks, controls, and optimises its expenses, from supplier payments to employee reimbursements. It’s a foundational process for every business, affecting cash flow, forecasting, and financial compliance.

Strong spend management helps businesses:

• Stay within budget

• Improve financial accuracy

• Prevent unnecessary costs

• Make confident, data-backed decisions

What is AI spend management?

AI spend management uses artificial intelligence to automate the expense lifecycle and generate smarter insights. As well as doing obvious things like digitising receipts, AI systems learn patterns, detect anomalies, and reduce manual effort throughout the expense process.

In practice, this can look like:

• Auto-matching receipts to transactions

• Real-time alerts for out-of-policy spend

• Predictive forecasts for upcoming budget changes

• AI-powered categorisation and fraud detection

The spend struggle is real

Even as other parts of the business get smarter and faster, spend management often feels stuck in the past. Here’s where most teams using traditional spend management tools are running into trouble:

Manual processing and human error

Submitting expenses is still a slow, manual task for many teams. Employees have to hang onto receipts, fill in expense forms, and chase approvals, often by email. Mistakes happen easily: The wrong category, missed tax details, or the same receipt uploaded twice. For finance teams, this means constantly playing catch-up.  

Fragmented systems

You’re not alone if you're using one platform for company cards, another for expense approvals, something else for supplier payments, and a separate accounting tool. But you're likely spending too much time moving data between systems and trying to make sense of it all.

This kind of setup makes it hard to get a clear picture of what’s been spent, by who, and why. You end up relying on spreadsheets, workarounds, and hoping for the best.

Limited visibility and control

When spend data is delayed or scattered across tools, it’s hard to spot issues early. You don’t know something’s gone over budget until it’s too late.

Without smart controls, policies often don’t get enforced properly. A new team member books premium flights? Someone renews a tool you no longer use? Those things can easily slip through the cracks.

Global complexity

For businesses operating across multiple regions, things get even trickier. Reimbursing a team member in another country might take days. FX fees add up fast. Approval flows become inconsistent depending on where people are based.

Most traditional tools just aren’t built to handle that complexity. They rely on legacy systems or third-party banking providers, which means slower payouts, limited flexibility, and more admin for your team.

How AI makes life easier for finance teams

AI-driven spend platforms can reshape the way your team works, saving time, improving control, and helping the business run smoother overall.

Here’s what you get when using AI in spend management:

Smarter, faster expense processing

AI can help you avoid chasing people for receipts or waiting days for sign-off. With smart workflows and built-in rules, expenses move through the system automatically. That means less admin for your team, and employees get their money back faster.

Lower costs, especially across borders

If your team works across borders, AI infrastructure really pays off. For example, Airwallex uses its own FX engine and banking network to move money faster and more affordably. That means you avoid the usual delays and hidden fees you get with traditional banks or third-party processors.

More control without micromanagement

AI-powered tools help enforce your expense policy automatically, flag anything that’s out of line, and apply the right spend limits at the right time. 

Fewer tools 

One of the biggest wins is less fragmentation. You don’t need separate tools for cards, reimbursements, supplier payments, and FX. It’s all in one platform, connected, automated, and ready to scale as your business grows.

Better fraud and policy controls

AI models are great at spotting things that don’t look right. Whether it’s a duplicate claim, a suspicious vendor, or out-of-policy spend, the system can catch it early, before it becomes a bigger issue.

Real-time visibility

AI-powered dashboards can pull everything together in real time, so you can see where the money’s going, by team, department, or region, at any time. 

How to make the switch to AI-powered spend management

Ready to modernise your spend setup? Here’s how to do it right:

Choose a platform built for scale

Many spend tools are layered on top of third-party infrastructure, which can create limitations. A platform with its own financial systems or direct integrations will give you more control, better performance, and fewer delays.

Build in control from day one

The best platforms let you set up approval workflows, assign spending limits, and apply rules based on team, region, or individual roles. This lets you speed up operations without giving up oversight.

Plan with global operations in mind

If your business works across borders (or plans to) look for a platform that supports multiple currencies, card issuing in different markets, and localised payment options. Thinking globally from the start helps avoid complex workarounds later.

Prioritise usability

A spend platform only delivers value if people actually use it. Choose a system that’s intuitive, with simple processes and clear prompts. The less training it requires, the faster it becomes part of how your teams work.

Why use Airwallex for spend management?

Airwallex is purpose-built for growing global businesses. It brings together spend control, automation, payments, and reporting into one secure, intelligent system, so you can spend less time managing processes and more time driving results.

Here’s what that means for your business:

AI that works in the background, where it matters

Airwallex applies AI across the expense lifecycle: extracting data from receipts, categorising transactions, learning from team inputs, and applying rules automatically. This reduces the need for manual entry, speeds up processing, and improves accuracy over time.

One platform, built from the ground up

Unlike competitors that rely on external infrastructure, Airwallex handles every layer: issuing its own corporate cards, managing cross-border payouts, running its own FX engine, and building compliance directly into the platform. This creates a more responsive and reliable spend experience.

Real-time visibility and control

From corporate card usage to global reimbursements, finance teams can see exactly what's being spent, where, and by who across multiple entities and currencies. Custom approval workflows, spend limits, and transaction filters make it easy to stay in control.

Fully connected expense ecosystem

Airwallex is not a single-feature tool. The spend solution is part of a broader suite, which includes:

• Business accounts for holding and managing funds

• Multi-currency corporate cards for company and employee purchases

• Expense management to handle approvals, receipts, and reporting

• Bill pay for automated supplier payments

• FX and transfers with competitive rates and fast settlement

• Accounting integrations to sync directly with your existing systems

Built for international teams

Whether you're scaling across Europe, Asia, or North America, Airwallex supports card issuance, reimbursements, and payments in local currencies. Employees can submit expenses in their own language and quickly get reimbursed to their local bank account.

Designed for scale, with admin and employee experience in mind

Admins get a full view of company spend from a single dashboard, with the ability to drill into transactions, enforce limits, and customise workflows by entity or region. Employees can upload receipts, categorise spend, and submit claims directly from the mobile app.