Dive Brief:

• Finance tech startup Brex announced Tuesday that it’s rolling out a new artificial intelligence tool designed to boost its employee expense management suite.

• The tool, known as Brex Assistant, can flag expenses that don’t fall under corporate policies, among other capabilities, according to Brex Chief Operating Officer Michael Tannenbaum.

• “This really helps increase compliance with expense policies overall and also makes the job of CFOs and finance teams much easier,” he said in an interview.

Dive Insight:

Brex is one of many software vendors that are racing to bet on AI following the swift rise of ChatGPT, a generative AI tool created by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Eighty-nine percent of software companies are already using AI to differentiate their products — 15 percentage points higher than other sectors, according to a report published Monday by global management consultancy firm Bain & Company. The current generation of AI tools and models could help companies speed up 20% of worker tasks without a loss in quality, according to the research.

“The rapid uptake of AI over the past year and the many ways that it contributes to productivity and creativity have generated a broad wave of enthusiasm across the entire tech sector and beyond,” the report said.

Revenues of generative AI offerings across a broad range of categories are forecast to reach $3.7 billion this year and expand to $36 billion by 2028, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Brex, which was founded in 2017, has ramped up its AI investments over the past year, particularly in customer-facing applications, the company said in a Tuesday press release announcing its latest product launch.

“Finance teams and managers can look forward to record-breaking employee compliance levels and increased productivity,” Henrique Dubugras, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO, said in the release.

Brex got its start by offering corporate credit cards to startups. Expense management software services were added over time.

With its recent AI enhancements, Brex has saved enterprise customers an average of 300 hours per month in employee expense compliance efforts, the company said. Also, on an annual basis, as much as $18 million in overall cost savings have been realized by using AI-powered controls to block customers’ out-of-policy spending, according to the release.

Brex’s new tool is designed to automatically populate expense materials in a more efficient fashion, organizing each expense into the relevant categories and providing finance teams with more accurate insights into employee spending, a company spokesperson said in an email. Having higher compliance from employees results in “faster time to close the books and gather essential insights, and less time spent reviewing individual expense reports,” the spokesperson said.