2025 finance insights: How AI transforms spend management
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Let’s face it — finance teams are challenged daily by changing market conditions and constantly evolve with new technology standards. And as we move deeper into 2025, these challenges are only growing. Despite ongoing efforts to digitise and streamline processes, many organisations still find themselves caught in a web of inefficient complexity when controlling company spending.
Complex organisational structures can sometimes tire finance teams. About 75 per cent of finance leaders point to this as a major obstacle. With businesses operating across multiple markets, departments, and legal entities, gaining a clear and consolidated view of spending is no easy task, yet it is very important.
The growing weight of external regulations makes spend management even more challenging for 66 per cent of finance teams. From shifting tax laws and data protection rules to evolving sustainability requirements, keeping up with regulations is a constant effort. For global organisations, the challenge multiplies as they try to stay compliant in every country they operate in. The cost of getting this wrong? Fines, reputational risk, and increased scrutiny from regulators.
As if that weren’t enough, internal policies and rules present another roadblock. A staggering 59 per cent of CFOs report struggling to navigate their own company’s policies. Juggling different departments that may have different rules and approval processes often leaves employees guessing. The result is a confusing and inconsistent approach to spending—and a rising risk of non-compliance.
These inefficiencies and risks can be a thing of the past: Thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, spend management today is streamlined and cuts through complexity. With AI tools, finance teams can control budgets with greater confidence, accuracy, and speed. By eliminating tedious workflows and enforcing policies through automation, artificial intelligence (AI) can give finance leaders the clarity and confidence they need to steer their organisations in the right direction.
Let’s find out what the future holds for finance teams in 2025!
The growing role of AI in finance
CFOs and finance teams face growing demands on cost savings, compliance and focusing on strategic work. On the other hand, AI is quickly becoming a critical part of the solution: Unsurprisingly, 77 per cent of finance leaders plan to increase their investment in AI in 2025 as they recognise that AI is now essential to modern financial operations.
One area where AI is already making a measurable impact is spend management: What used to be a manual, time-consuming process is now being automated and streamlined. AI removes the heavy lifting. From reviewing expense reports and chasing approvals to tracking budgets and enforcing policies, AI gives finance teams the power to process expenses faster, helps them stay compliant with evolving regulations, and provides real-time visibility into spending.
AI tools improve decision-making, as predictive analytics and real-time insights allow CFOs to forecast cash flow, manage budgets dynamically, and spot risks before they escalate—all crucial in today’s fast-changing business environment.
Leveraging AI’s machine learning abilities can help navigate growing complexities, regulatory demands, and workforce shortages despite resource constraints. Those who embrace AI for spend management will be best positioned to cut costs, stay compliant, and make smarter business decisions.
Blog article
What Is Spend Management? Fundamentals and How It Works
In today’s competitive market, companies that can effectively manage their spending are better positioned to grow and remain profitable.
Lars Mangelsdorf,
CCO at Yokoy
Key AI-driven trends in spend management for 2025
As finance teams look to regain control over spend management in 2025, AI-powered tools and automation are driving a wave of transformation. It’s believed that AI will soon be even more powerful in helping to boost productivity and efficiency.
Automation of expense processes
Manual expense management has long been one of the most time-consuming and inefficient workflows in finance. Chasing receipts, collecting data in spreadsheets, processing approvals, and checking for policy compliance are all traditional processes riddled with bottlenecks. In 2025, automation is taking centre stage and can dramatically reduce manual effort in expense processing and approvals.
Finance teams that leverage AI tools can now automatically capture, categorise, and validate expenses. Employees no longer need to submit their receipts and keep finance teams busy reviewing them manually. Automated approval workflows ensure that expenses are checked against company policies and approved by the right stakeholders without delays. Processes can be streamlined, operational efficiency can be increased, and finance teams can be freed to focus on strategic initiatives rather than paperwork.
AI-powered compliance
Staying compliant with internal policies and external regulations is increasingly complex, especially for organisations operating across multiple regions. AI-powered compliance checks can help finance teams ensure policy enforcement.
Additionally, AI-driven risk management tools monitor every transaction in real-time, flagging suspicious activity and identifying non-compliant expenses. This up-to-date expense tracking helps prevent fraud before it slips through the cracks while not adding to the workload.
AI also helps companies stay up to date with changing regulations. Automatically adapting to new rules and thresholds reduces the risk of costly mistakes or fines. Without these disruptions, finance teams’ daily workflows with AI power can proactively protect the business from risks rather than reacting to issues after the fact.
Real-time analytics
Making informed decisions about company spending requires more than just month-end reports. In 2025, real-time analytics will enable finance teams to monitor spending as it happens—wherever it occurs. This will offer smarter, data-driven decision-making that improves financial control.
AI-driven predictive analytics gives finance leaders real-time insights into spending patterns, budget performance, and cash flow. These insights allow finance teams to forecast future spending, spot trends, and adjust budgets dynamically. These deeper insights help finance leaders optimise resource allocation and improve profitability. This makes data-driven decisions possible based on the latest information—not guesswork.
Cross-entity spend control
For many companies, complex organisational structures can create fragmented views of spending. With different departments, subsidiaries, and regions all managing their budgets, finance teams struggle to consolidate data and consistently enforce policies.
However, with 2025’s AI solutions, finance teams will gain cross-entity visibility and control over spending, no matter how complex the organisation is. AI can review datasets from across the company, providing a unified view of total spending, flagging outliers, and ensuring compliance frameworks are applied consistently. Whether managing procurement, expense reports, or supplier payments, AI can streamline workflows and enforce policies across every part of the business.
Closing the talent gap through modernisation
Financial services also face a significant talent gap. As workforce shortages and increasing complexity pressure finance teams, AI can be integral in modernising operations and making finance roles more attractive and sustainable.
By reducing manual effort and automating repetitive tasks, AI helps finance professionals focus on higher-value work, such as strategic planning, financial forecasting, and risk management. This shift improves operational efficiency and helps attract and retain top talent. Trained professionals can help upskill workforces with AI to make finance teams future-proof.
How AI transforms spend management: the benefits
AI-powered spend management is a game-changer for finance teams: Artificial intelligence delivers tangible benefits beyond efficiency by automating tedious processes and providing real-time insights.
Increased efficiency: Repetitive tasks like data entry, expense categorisation, invoice matching, and approvals are fully automated, cutting down on manual work and freeing finance teams to focus on strategic priorities such as financial planning and forecasting.
Improved compliance: Built-in checks help ensure every transaction aligns with tax regulations and company policies, flagging non-compliant expenses before they cause issues. This additionally reduces the risk of costly errors and manual reviews.
Enhanced visibility: Real-time analytics and predictive insights give finance leaders a live view of spending patterns, budgets, and risks. CFOs get more accurate forecasting and agile cash flow management and can be confident in decision-making.
Reduced fraud risk: Automated detection of suspicious transactions, such as duplicate claims or inflated expenses, stops fraud before it happens. This proactively helps to protect the company from financial and reputational damage.
Fewer human errors: Automating detailed tasks like receipt verification and policy checks reduces mistakes, improves data accuracy, and makes audits easier. This allows finance teams to focus on higher-value work instead of fixing avoidable errors.
Blog article
Automated Expense Reporting: Simplify Expense Tracking and Maximize Compliance
Automated expense reporting helps you simplify expense tracking, enforce compliance, and streamline your expense management workflows. See how it works.
Lars Mangelsdorf,
Co-founder and CCO
AI-powered spend management with Yokoy
Smarter and more efficient solutions for expense management are already here: AI-powered platforms like Yokoy are setting a new standard. Integrating state-of-the-art artificial intelligence into every part of Yokoy gives you an automated, intelligent spend management solution that empowers your finance team to tackle today’s most pressing challenges.
End-to-end expense automation
At the core of Yokoy’s AI-driven platform is end-to-end automation of the entire expense management process, removing the need for manual intervention. AI models automatically read receipts, capture and categorise expenses, and extract data without human input. The system automatically matches invoices to purchase orders, processes approvals, and applies your company-specific rules.
This automation streamlines workflows, saving time and reducing manual effort. It ensures that your finance team can focus on higher-value activities like forecasting, financial planning, and strategic decisions rather than getting bogged down in administrative work. Your processes can be accelerated by using AI tools to automate expense reporting and approvals while maintaining complete accuracy and control.
Built-in expense policies
Yokoy can enforce built-in expense policies automatically, rather than relying on employees to remember complicated guidelines. AI reviews every transaction against your company’s policies in real-time.
Whether it’s limits on business travel expenses, meal allowances, or country-specific tax regulations, AI algorithms help ensure that every expense is compliant before it reaches approval workflows. This AI-powered compliance feature significantly reduces the risk of policy violations and fraud. This simplified process helps your employees, as they no longer need to guess what’s acceptable. This can strengthen your company’s risk management and help to ensure consistent adherence to rules, no matter how complex your organisation is.
Frictionless experiences
Yokoy’s AI-powered platform is designed to improve control and deliver frictionless, user-friendly experiences for your employees and finance teams alike. By leveraging AI and automation, Yokoy eliminates much of the back-and-forth that traditionally slows down expense management.
Your employees can simply capture and upload their receipts into the system—AI does the rest. Extracting datasets, categorising expenses, and submitting them for approval are all done without any need for tedious form-filling. Approvers receive smart notifications and AI-recommended actions, cutting down on unnecessary backlogs. The system also provides real-time insights into spending patterns, allowing finance leaders to make data-driven decisions quickly and confidently.
Next steps
Yokoy’s AI-powered spend management solution combines automation, built-in compliance, and user-friendly experiences to give your finance team complete control over spending without the complexity.
Book a demo now to make smarter financial decisions in 2025 and beyond.
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