AI-Driven Spend Management: Boosting Business Resilience

Recent years have brought significant uncertainty for procurement teams, with global volatility reshaping how organisations manage spend and resilience. 

In response, procurement leaders and solution providers like Soldo and SpendHQ are leveraging technology, real-time visibility and AI-driven analytics to revolutionise spend management and deliver true strategic value.

This technological transformation is evidenced by major enterprises partnering with advanced spend analytics providers to unlock substantial cost savings and operational efficiencies.

Spend analytics is set to dominate the procurement analytics market in 2025, capturing 47.8% of revenue, according to Future Market Insights. By revealing purchasing patterns and supplier costs, it helps organisations uncover savings, reduce risk and negotiate stronger contracts. 

As supply chains grow more complex, companies increasingly depend on these tools for transparency and control. Advanced data integration and the ability to process unstructured data are accelerating adoption, making spend analytics essential to procurement transformation.

From efficiency to resilience

Procurement has evolved well beyond traditional cost-cutting. Today’s function centres on creating resilient, diversified supply chains, anticipating risks before they materialise and supporting wider business objectives. 

This approach empowers teams to spend responsibly while giving finance leaders firm control and oversight, underpinning a shift towards proactive spend management that is fit for modern businesses.​

Visibility has become the linchpin of effective spend management. Today’s spend management solutions prioritise real-time insight, automated categorisation and AI-powered anomaly detection. 

Brandon Till, Head of Business Solutions at Soldo, explains: “Traditionally, spend reporting has been a retrospective, paper-heavy exercise. The result was a partial, backward-looking view of company spending that made it hard to spot patterns, control tail spend or reliably detect expense fraud. 

“Modern spend analytics flips that model, capturing every transaction at the point of purchase, typically via smart cards connected to a central platform and enriching it in real time with receipts, categories, project codes and policy rules.”

AI not only streamlines administrative tasks but brings strategic clarity, transforming analytics into a lever for real-time, progressive decision-making.

As highlighted by SpendHQ’s work with PepsiCo, enterprise-wide platforms deliver unified data sources and enable actionable insights with a few clicks. This transition from fragmented, often manual, month-end data to real-time “single source of truth” is opening the door for procurement to align with broader organisational objectives and support business agility.

Lauren Hymen, Vice President for Strategy and Transformation at PepsiCo, says: “By leveraging SpendHQ’s advanced analytics platform, we can identify spending patterns, track expenditures and unlock opportunities for cost savings across all our procurement categories.”

Uncovering value and closing spend gaps

Brandon highlights the persistent gaps where organisations leave value “on the table”.

He says: “The biggest value leak is still in decentralised, day-to-day spend. Much of this remains buried in POs, card statements and manual reconciliations.

“Too many teams are stuck reporting on last month instead of using real-time insights to shape what happens next.”

By centralising and automating spend data at the point of purchase, teams gain live, trusted insights that empower proactive actions such as negotiating better supplier terms or driving new opportunities. 

Automating reconciliation and eliminating low-value admin enhances procurement’s capacity for strategic, high-value work, including supplier diversification and resilience initiatives.

AI’s growing role in spend analytics

AI is fast becoming “the backbone of spend analytics,” according to Brandon.

“The quickest wins are in automation and risk control,” he continues. “AI can categorise and enrich thousands of tail-spend transactions in seconds, eliminating manual coding and giving procurement a clean, comparable view of spend by supplier, category and team.

“It can also power anomaly detection and policy monitoring, flagging out-of-policy, duplicate or unusually high transactions as they happen, not weeks later.”

Crucially, with the rise of generative AI-generated fake receipts, having complete, real-time spend visibility makes expense fraud much easier to spot and prevent.

Rather than replacing human judgement, AI augments procurement’s role – enabling teams to focus on progressive, strategic activities rather than reactive, administrative ones.

Spend visibility and strategic goals

Greater spend visibility has a direct impact on goals like supply chain resilience, ESG performance and risk management. 

“Procurement will always be accountable for controlling costs, but you can’t control what you can’t see,” adds Brandon. “Real-time visibility changes that. It gives leaders a complete picture of operational and tail spend without adding more manual admin into the process.”

Real-time data unlocks the ability to proactively manage supply risks, link spend activity to carbon metrics and compliance and, ultimately, positions procurement as a strategic advisor rather than simply an operational function.

Technology partnerships fuel transformation

Platforms like Soldo and SpendHQ enable this transformation in practice. 

Soldo’s combination of real-time expense tracking, powerful reporting, automated reconciliation and integration with accounting and ERP systems brings clarity and efficiency to thousands of organisations across Europe, empowering finance and procurement to steer business performance, not just monitor it.​​

SpendHQ and PepsiCo’s collaboration exemplifies how real-time, integrated spend intelligence is delivering company-wide benefits, supporting global alignment, accelerating decisions and uncovering cost savings at scale.

Procurement leaders embracing these advances in real-time analytics and AI are repositioning their function as a critical driver of business strategy. As volatility continues, resilient, intelligent spend management has become imperative. 

The future of procurement runs on live, trusted spend intelligence and the ability to confidently lead business-wide transformation.