Extend’s New Open-Source AI Toolkit Helps Businesses Manage Card Spend

Spend management platform Extend has launched an open-source AI toolkit to help business owners keep tabs on company expenses. If you’re a business owner who’s already set with your credit card program, don’t fret. Extend’s new tool can work with your existing cards.

One thing that can stop people from starting their own business is all the extra stuff you need to be mindful of to keep your company humming along. I know that’s something that would make me think twice if I was thinking about launching a new business.

Between dealing with customers, vendors, and, in some cases, employees who aren’t getting the job done, business owners can have their hands full. And we haven’t even talked about a business’s main reason for existing, which is to sell something to people or other enterprises.

But Extend’s new solution can help business owners with their concerns over managing company expenditures. We caught up with Jonathan Bailey, Extend’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), to discuss how the company helps businesses manage their credit card spend.

Bailey told us the company’s open-source toolkit gives its clients technological building blocks that they can use to create their own workflows and experiences. A big way that Extend supports businesses that are trying to get a handle on managing spend is through its virtual card program. 

Business owners can update their virtual card with metadata around expense categories or spending controls, Bailey told us. And they can pull all of their transactions, monitor their spending, and create other custom workflows with the company’s API product.

“And now, with a very small amount of code and an agent that’s working on your behalf, simply with a prompt, you can have one agent that’s managing workflows turn off your cards if there’s some spending associated with it that’s out of pattern,” Bailey explained to us. “There are wildly different use cases that can be supported with just a prompt.”

I’ve noticed that many businesses find success when they accomplish at least one of two things. They can either provide a service or offer a product that the public has been clamoring for. Or, through research and innovation, they can meet a need their customers didn’t know they had.

Extend’s open-source AI toolkit is largely the result of the company’s tinkering to discover new ways to make life easier for business owners. But it also has core use cases that its clients have requested, Bailey told us. 

“Our clients love to get more insights out of the platform we offer,” Bailey said. “They’d love more automation and more powerful controls, and this is something that we enable for them, too. It’s my job as the CTO to understand what the problem is they’re facing and then put a solution in front of customers that they might not have thought about.”

We wanted to learn more about the practical ways the toolkit can help businesses out of a jam, so we asked Bailey about that. We learned that the toolkit can benefit agencies that take on expenses on behalf of their clients. Bailey told us they can use Extend’s solution to automate the isolation of spending for separate clients.

You may find this kind of solution hard to believe, but some businesses may not have a tight grasp on what they’re spending their funds on at times. Bailey told us that it’s not uncommon for businesses Extend works with to have trouble pinpointing where 20% of their total company spend goes. 

But with assistance, and by adding more intelligence into their spend platform, that number can go down, Bailey said. And when a business doesn’t have to worry as much over where each dollar is going, it can focus more on the value it brings to its customers.

Artificial intelligence isn’t foolproof, but Extend’s history as a credit card platform means it has control and approval guardrails that can reduce AI errors.

“With these AI solutions that we’re enabling, we can leverage those guardrails in order to create more trust and make sure that the tech is working the way it’s supposed to,” Bailey said.

“The more assistance that we can provide to a business, the better,” he added. “I’ve been working with this stuff for years, but, on a weekly basis I am blown away by how powerful the technology is.” 

We live in a technology-driven age where we can talk to our microwaves and take a ride in robotic taxis. The reach of technology extends so far in the 2020s that it can be tough for us when we have to do something without the aid of recent innovations.

Extend grasps those sorts of problems and allows a business owner to more efficiently manage company finances with the aid of its toolkit. Bailey told us that some of the company’s clients have sophisticated accounting programs that can help them create financial reports with ease. But some don’t.

Extend offers a chat-like interface that lets business owners interact with their finances and keep a pulse on company spend.

“What’s really cool is that these agents can write code as well,” Bailey said. “So you ask a question, and it will pull your transactions and then write code to visualize your spending as a bar chart or pie chart or whatever to give you different cuts of the spending so you can have an interactive conversation with your ledger. That’s pretty powerful.”

Extend’s tools can create charts that help a business visualize its spend.

Most businesses want to save money when they can, and Extend can help them do that by analyzing what they’re paying for certain items and attempting to locate a better deal for a similar type of purchase from another vendor.

Armed with that information, a company’s leaders can then either negotiate a better deal with current vendors or seek another partner to buy from.

Extend’s tools allow a business to schedule virtual card cancellations to align with upcoming objectives. Though the company has created a powerful solution for business owners, Bailey said he’s looking forward to seeing where other users take things next.

“What I’ve learned from building products for developers is that they will use and build in ways that we can’t possibly imagine right now and sort of push the platform,” he told us. “It’s one of the reasons that we’re excited about open source because it’s kind of the market for innovation and AI. It’s where new ideas come from, and it’s where ideas are shared.”