AI at Pleo: our vision for spend that runs itself
Fresh insights from 2,650 finance decision-makers across Europe
Every spend decision means a chain of manual steps. Every link in that chain takes time, creates delays, and adds to the plate of already stretched finance teams.
We're building a suite of AI agents to change that.
These specialised AI agents will execute routine tasks autonomously, so finance leaders can focus on leading strategically.
From workflow to workforce
Today, spend management is powered by workflows: work moves between employees, managers, finance teams and accounting. Every step requires a human. Tomorrow, specialised agents handle the execution. Humans only handle the exceptions.
By 2027, Pleo becomes an extended digital team. Five specialised agents run in the background:
- Pleo MCP (launching this summer): Captures card transactions, finds receipts, writes memos, applies GL codes and submits. Before the employee leaves the restaurant.
- Policy Agent (live now): Enforces company spend rules in real time. Checks every expense and purchase against policy, flags exceptions, routes approvals correctly.
- AP Agent: Processes invoices from email, creates records, codes them, schedules payment and tracks approval status end to end.
- Treasury Agent: Optimises cash flow, schedules payments and surfaces budget risk before it becomes a problem.
- Accounting Agent: Codes transactions, reconciles accounts and closes the books. Flags only what genuinely needs a human decision.
Where we're going: the longer horizon
Beyond 2027, our vision is for agents to coordinate. An orchestrator sits above the specialised agents, connecting to a company's full financial context: policies, budgets, vendor relationships, approval history. Every spend decision gets made, validated and recorded automatically. Finance teams shift from executing to supervising.
- Now (2026): Specialised agents reduce manual tasks across expense management, AP, budgets and close. Finance teams work less, decide more.
- Next (2026–2027): Every spend decision is managed by an agent network. Humans supervise. Agents execute. Pleo becomes your extended digital team.
- Future (2027–2030): Pleo becomes the AI-powered operating system for company spend. Automatically controlled, paid, recorded and optimised.
Two ways to use it today
Pleo's agentic AI tools are available in two ways from July 2026 and onwards:
-
Coming soon. The Pleo-provided agent will work inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp and SMS. No new app. When an expense needs a receipt, it looks in the employee's inbox first. When a budget threshold is crossed, it notifies the right person. When month-end approaches, it starts the close.
- Available from July. The MCP interface lets any AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot) connect directly to Pleo's data and take action. Finance teams and employees using tools they already have can query spend, process expenses and run reports without switching context. Pleo becomes composable infrastructure.
Where Pleo is unique: European complexity is built in
Autonomous spend management in Europe is harder than anywhere else. Sixteen markets, multiple currencies, VAT logic that varies by country, and regulatory obligations that mean every automated financial action needs a proper audit trail. Nevertheless, organisations are under pressure to scale.
However, the finance systems they have in place are not. According to our new research*, 45% of companies say their current process slows them down, with leaders saying they struggle to move at speed because it is so cumbersome.
AI can be the solution here. But while 73% believe the future of finance teams and professionals depends on the comprehensive understanding and use of AI, 63% say the AI skills, training and confidence of finance teams are severely lagging.
The answer isn’t just AI, it’s AI that integrates into financial functions and workflows, balances high performance with low interruption, and covers the breadth of modern-day organisations. It’s AI built by CFOs, for CFOs.
Pleo has been building inside this complexity for a decade, across 40,000 companies. That's the foundation our agents run on. We don't approximate European compliance. We handle it correctly, by market, by rule.
* This research is taken from a forthcoming report from Pleo, launching in September 2026. The survey was conducted by Sapio Research in April 2026, among finance decision-makers and finance professionals in organisations with 51 to 1,000 employees in Germany, Spain and the UK.
