The Payhawk AI Agents enable you to complete common tasks and request information in Payhawk by chatting with them as AI assistants, instead of doing everything manually.
Whether you need to submit expenses, book travel, manage company cards, or make procurement requests, you can interact with the AI Agents in Slack, MS Teams (currently supported by the Financial Controller AI Agent only), the Payhawk Web Portal, or the Payhawk Mobile App to get things done more efficiently.
Payhawk AI Agents, including the Financial Controller, Implementation, Payments, Procurement, and Travel agents, assist with a variety of tasks through chat interactions. These capabilities are divided into skills and playbooks.
Skills
skills are single-step tasks that represent the native capabilities of an AI Agent. Examples include submitting an expense, submitting an expense report, freezing a card, or reading a purchase order.
Each agent owns a set of skills, but you do not need to know which agent owns which task. When your request needs a skill owned by another agent, Payhawk routes it to that agent and completes it there.
Playbooks
Playbooks are multi-step, end-to-end financial procedures, such as performing a month-end close. You can think of them as recipes - a playbook runs a sequence of skills in the same order each time to reach a set result. Playbooks cover structured procedures such as the month-end close, and longer agent jobs such as booking a flight or a hotel.
Payhawk provides default (built-in) playbooks, such as the Payment run coverage, which monitors currency availability for upcoming payment runs, or the three-way match, which compares ordered, received, and invoiced amounts to identify gaps and retrieve missing documentation before payment.
Every playbook is owned by an agent, based on the work it does. The same routing applies as with skills, so you can ask any agent to run any playbook.
Custom playbooks
You can build your own playbooks. You create a new playbook through the chat, and it can extend existing skills and built-in playbooks. For example, you can add steps to the standard month-end close. Custom playbooks build on the Payhawk data and functionality your company already has.
Permissions and access
Access to skills and playbooks is role-based, which means that you see and trigger the actions that match your role. Most playbooks are built for the Payhawk Accountant and Payhawk Administrator roles while the Payhawk Employee role has access to a smaller set.
Finding and running skills and playbooks
In the Payhawk Web Portal and Payhawk Mobile App, you can filter skills and playbooks by area, agent, and type. You can run playbooks across all entities in your organization. When you open a playbook, Payhawk lists its steps for you to review before it runs.
Payhawk keeps all interactions and actions. No history is deleted, so you can go back to past runs at any time.
Entry points
You can operate on your data and achieve your tasks either by using the Payhawk AI Agents’s skills and playbooks, or by connecting your AI Assistant to the Payhawk MCP and utilize the playbooks there.
Both entry points provide identical results, allowing users to choose the method that best fits their workflow:
Use Payhawk AI Agents if you are mainly working in the Payhawk Web Portal.
Use the Payhawk MCP if you are mainly using and querying Payhawk data through external AI Assistants.
Interaction
To complete a task, you only need to state your request or ask a question. The AI Agents find the right skill or playbook and trigger the correct action. For detailed information on specific capabilities, users can query the agents directly.
Brief overview of the Agents’ capabilities
The following table provides a brief summary of what each Payhawk AI Agent can do as a high-level overview of its capabilities.
AI Agent | What the AI Agents can do for you |
|---|---|
Manages the full expense lifecycle: submit expenses, upload and match receipts, fetch vendor invoices, and track or un-submit your own items. As a reviewer or approver, work your queue, approve, reject or return expenses (individually or in bulk), and recode categories, tax and fields at scale. It also runs your close, exports, unexported and failed items, budgets, expense chasing with a customizable reminder schedule, and gives you reports, anomaly reviews and the full audit trail. | |
Guides Payhawk Administrators through setup, step by step. It builds a personalized rollout plan, always shows the next unblocked step, and handles blockers like KYC in the background. It walks you through connecting your accounting or ERP system, mapping accounts, building approval workflows, issuing cards and funding your account, then verifies everything works so you reach first spend in days. | |
Manages cards, funds and company money in one place: view cards and spend, freeze, unfreeze or close a card, request a new card, more funds or cash, and handle claims, mileage and allowances. It gives you the cash position, runway and payment-run coverage across currencies and entities, answers questions on spend, bills, subscriptions and FX, and keeps people informed with alerts on declines, claims and low balances. | |
Raises and tracks purchase requests end to end: turn a plain-language need into the right request type, pre-fill it from a quote or link, and follow where it stands. Approvers can approve, reject, return, edit or comment, run a three-way match, and record receipts and invoices. It also manages suppliers, budgets and commitments, and answers questions on supplier and request spend. | |
Plans and books business travel end to end: search and compare in-policy flights and hotels, pick fares and rooms, and book on the right entity and card. View, change or cancel trips, book for colleagues, groups or multi-city routes, and run automated check-in. Approvers can review and decide on requests, and it handles refunds, re-bookings, loyalty programmes, per-diems and travel documents. | |
All Payhawk AI Agents | Every agent can explain how Payhawk works for your setup. All agents (except for the Payments AI Agent) can also find people and what they hold, show teams, and set an out-of-office delegate. |
The detailed list of skills and supported playbooks by each agent is available as part of the respective agents documentation: