CFOs: Beware AI-powered business travel risks

There’s nothing quite like traveling to make a person feel more human. So of course, we’d turn to AI to enhance that experience.

As Morning Brew recently reported, “[f]rom reimbursements to booking trips,” AI is streamlining business travel. That brings up new risks for CFOs and their accounts payable staff. Those risks are best managed through proper governance—but updates to organizations’ best practices often lag behind rapidly changing AI technology, according to one business-travel expert.

“Companies aren’t quite moving fast enough and keeping up with their travelers, who are already using the tools in the market, and they should be really embedding them into their ecosystems,” Paul Dear, VP of travel for EMEA at SAP Concur, told CFO Brew.

A recent survey commissioned by SAP Concur found that three-quarters of business travelers use AI tools to help them coordinate their trips. The survey, conducted in April and carried out by Wakefield Research, includes responses from 3,300 business travelers, 800 travel managers, and 700 CFOs in 21 global markets.

More than seven in 10 (72%) of business travelers said they would use, or already have used, an AI tool that’s not approved by their employer to plan or book travel. Meanwhile, 85% of CFOs said they’re worried (justifiably, apparently) that employees are using unapproved AI in their business travel planning, and 92% said it’s “at least somewhat likely” that employees are using AI to falsify expenses or receipts.

“AI is running faster than enterprises that are keeping up with it,” Dear said. “You’ve got CFOs that have serious concerns about competitive information getting leaked into public domains and being available to be searched on various public AI tools.”

Organizations can best manage that risk, according to Dear, by making secure AI tools available to employees so they’re less likely to use so-called “shadow AI.”

“You gain governance by controlling your AI tool within your ecosystem,” he said.