The AI Office of the CFOFinance stays in control. Agents do the rest
You define how your company should spend. AI Agents take care of the rest — enforcing policy, chasing approvals, and filling the gaps. Finance stays in control, while employees stay in motion.
Controls stay tight. Processes get lighter
Payhawk Agents make compliance effortless by turning complex steps into simple conversations. They follow your rules, remember your team’s habits, and make every spend action feel natural.
Agents operate only within the policies, controls, approval logic, and financial structure you’ve already set — so autonomy never comes at the cost of compliance.
Agents learn personal habits and employee preferences, making every interaction natural, fast, and tailored — not robotic or repetitive.
Because everything happens through simple conversation, employees naturally follow the right process — guided step-by-step or handled fully by the agent.
Agents work inside Payhawk, Slack, and Teams — reaching people where they already are to unblock requests and keep spend moving.
From a Finance point of view, the agents are a huge energy saver. And for non-finance teams, it’s super empowering. I’m calling the Financial Controller Agent, my new best friend! And the Travel Agent makes what used to take an hour, just a four-minute task.
Business travel that plans, books, and pays itself
The Travel Agent turns every trip into a smooth, policy-aligned journey. You describe your trip and the agent handles the rest. From the initial request to booking, payment, and trip-level reconciliation.
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Turns your plain language trip description into a structured request — complete with your selected flights, hotels, and allowance. Then gets the approval chain moving.
Recommends flights and hotels across the globe, then books and pays with a predefined or newly issued card. It flags any out-of-policy options and triggers additional approvals when required.
Flights, hotels, taxis, meals — everything gets grouped into one tidy trip report. The agent prepares it for review, saving everyone from the usual after-trip admin.
Purchasing that starts with a chat and ends with a clear, compliant order.
The Procurement Agent turns plain-language requests into fully compliant workflows — applying policies, routing approvals, and driving payment without manual follow-ups or guesswork. Your quiet partner making procurement effortless – from the first request to final payment.
Turns your one-sentence request into a fully structured purchase intake. It asks for missing details, builds the request, and gets the right workflow moving.
Understands what you're trying to buy and routes each request through the correct approval path. It loops in the right approvers, reviewers, and budget owners, and follows up until a decision is made.
Once approved, it completes the process — issuing or funding a card, or routing the purchase for a bill payment. Everyone sees the same shared context, speeding up decisions.
Your shortcut to payments clarity and fewer questions hitting finance
The Payments Agent handles the questions that usually land on the finance team’s desk. It flags failed transactions, explains why they happened, then suggests actions for the next step. It also answers everyday platform questions before they ever reach finance.
Notifies you when a payment or card transaction fails and explains the reason. When possible, it suggests or even actions the next steps.
Responds instantly to questions like “What can I use my card for?” or “Has my reimbursement been paid?” It pulls the right controls, statuses, or policy details so you never go digging.
Acts as a product expert for your team. It can answer onboarding questions, explain workflows, and show people how things work, speeding up adoption for all users.
Expenses that keep moving and free you from chasing
The Financial Controller Agent handles the low-joy work: collecting receipts, filling in fields, and nudging people. It reads documents, matches them to spend, and pushes every expense forward without human chasing.
Follows up with employees for receipts, missing details, or unsubmitted expenses. It reaches out over the channels they actually use, so nothing gets stuck waiting.
Extracts information from photos, PDFs, and invoices. It fills accounting fields, categorizes spend, and even adds clear expense notes — so reports are ready for review much faster.
Grabs recurring invoices straight from vendor websites, uploads them, and prepares the matching expense. Monthly downloads and manual uploads disappear.
The "Why" and the "How" of AI Agents
Real answers from the team that built Payhawk’s AI Office of the CFO. In each episode, we unpack how AI agents think, act, and make decisions — so you can adopt AI with confidence, not fear.
FAQ
An AI agent in finance is a system that can understand what a user is trying to do, apply the company’s finance rules, and complete an entire workflow from start to finish. Unlike a chatbot, which only replies with information, or an automation rule, which triggers a single predefined action, an AI agent can turn plain-language requests into real operational steps. For example, it can create a purchase request, apply policies, route approvals, issue a card, or prepare an expense report. It behaves like a trained operations partner that follows your company’s controls and completes the work directly inside the finance system.
Payhawk’s AI agents are built directly into the platform, which means they act inside your existing company policies, approval flows, travel rules, card controls, spend limits, and accounting setup. Because they have structured access to your actual finance configuration, they go far beyond answering questions. They can interpret the request, select the right workflow, follow the correct approval chain, complete each step, and log the entire process. A generic chatbot cannot do this because it has no understanding of your specific rules, user permissions, or financial context. Payhawk’s agents operate within these guardrails and perform real work, not just surface-level assistance.
Payhawk’s AI agents work by interpreting a user’s natural-language request, checking it against your company’s finance policies and approval logic, and then executing the task inside the platform. They can gather missing details, create and categorise requests, route approvals, issue or fund cards, prepare expenses, or chase outstanding items. They always act within the user’s own role and permissions, which is a key security mechanism. An agent cannot access sensitive information or perform any action that the employee using it is not allowed to perform. All actions are logged, monitored, and governed by Payhawk’s security standards, including SOC 2 and ISO 27001. This ensures the agents are safe to use because they operate strictly inside your company’s rules and the user’s permission boundaries.
Memory in Payhawk works on two levels. The first level is system memory, which includes everything defined in your platform setup, such as spend rules, card controls, travel policies, vendor guidelines, approval flows, and accounting mappings. The agent uses this to ensure every action is compliant. The second level is long-term conversational memory, which is personal to each user. Over time, the agent can learn preferences like typical travel times, favourite hotel styles, or preferred communication patterns. This allows the agent to offer suggestions that feel natural and tailored, without ever accessing anything the user is not permitted to see.
Payhawk’s AI agents already handle a wide range of everyday finance operations. They can manage intake for purchase, travel, and spend requests, interpret the user’s intent, and turn a simple sentence into a structured workflow. They follow the correct approval logic, chase the right people, move requests forward, and complete steps such as booking travel, issuing cards, funding cards, preparing expenses, extracting receipt data, reconciling transactions, and fetching recurring invoices from vendor portals. They can also answer common questions about cards, reimbursements, and how to use the platform. Every task they perform runs inside the rules and controls defined by your finance team.
Payhawk’s agents automate the execution of finance tasks, but they do not replace human decision-makers. They never override approval chains, spend limits, or policy requirements. When a user needs to make a judgment call or approve spending, the agent simply ensures the request reaches the right person quickly and with the correct context. Automation happens around the user, not instead of the user. This means the agents keep work moving without ever bypassing governance.
Yes. Payhawk’s agents operate entirely within the structure configured in your workspace. They follow your specific approval flows, card controls, custom request types, travel policies, budgets, vendor rules, and accounting logic. They interpret user intent and then select the correct workflow based on your setup. Because they also inherit each employee’s permissions, they cannot perform actions or access information outside the boundaries defined by your finance team.
No. Payhawk’s agents are designed to make finance teams more efficient, not to replace them. They take over the repetitive operational work that consumes time — chasing receipts, nudging approvers, preparing expenses, fetching invoices, or answering common questions. This allows finance professionals to shift their focus toward analysis, forecasting, planning, business partnership, and strategic work. Agents eliminate the draining “firefighting mode” many teams are pushed into, but human expertise and oversight remain essential.
Payhawk’s agents are trained on the platform’s product logic and the structure of common finance workflows. When enabled in your company’s environment, they use your policies, approval flows, historical requests, card rules, and accounting settings as their operational framework. We follow the same data security rules as anywhere in our product. Our own agents access our data within the security of our infrastructure, everything is contained. This also means that LLM providers (Google Gemini) do not train using our customers’ data. We consider their data privacy as our top priority and we won’t compromise with this.
Yes. Payhawk applies the same security model to its AI agents as to the rest of its platform. This includes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, strict role-based access controls, encryption, and full audit logs. Because agents inherit the user’s permissions, they cannot access or act on anything the employee cannot. All actions are recorded and governed by your existing finance policies. This ensures each agent operates safely within your organisation’s security and compliance standards. We follow the same data security rules as anywhere in our product. Our own agents access our data within the security of our infrastructure, everything is contained. This also means that LLM providers (Google Gemini) do not train using our customers’ data. We consider their data privacy as our top priority and we won’t compromise with this.
AI agents in Payhawk work out of the box and can be enabled instantly. There is no separate implementation project because the agents operate within the rules, workflows, and approval logic already defined in your Payhawk setup. For travel, you simply confirm your travel policy; for procurement, you ensure your request types and approval flows are configured. After that, enabling an agent is as simple as flipping a toggle. You can choose whether the agent should operate inside the Payhawk platform or reach employees through Slack or Microsoft Teams, and it becomes available immediately.
Run finance through conversation.
