Overview
Expense policy agent lets you turn your own expense policy into an always-on AI reviewer for every employee card expense and reimbursement report your team submits. Available to Grow and Accelerate customers, it reads your policies to flag potential violations.
Once trained on your policies, this AI agent helps you:
Save time: Reduce the manual workload of reading receipts, cross-checking values, and verifying each line against your policy.
Increase accuracy: Catch duplicates, mismatched currencies, and policy violations that humans might miss, based on the rules you actually enforce today.
Educate users: Provide clear, policy-based explanations when an expense is flagged, including links to the relevant section(s) of your policy so approvers understand the “why”.
Even if you haven’t set an expense policy yet, Policy agent still provides baseline protection out of the box by checking for standard errors like duplicate receipts and obviously wrong values.
Note: While Policy agent is highly accurate, by design human approvers maintain full control and final decision-making power over all expenses.
How Policy agent works
Policy agent works in the background of your expense approval flow.
When an employee submits a card expense or reimbursement report:
General checks: Policy agent first checks standard settings (e.g., required fields).
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AI evaluation: Policy agent reads the expense details and receipt, checks for issues like duplicates or wrong values, and if customized, compares all details against your expense policies and its hidden notes.
If compliant: The agent marks the expense as verified. A green badge appears.
If non-compliant or in doubt: The agent flags the expense for review. It will list one or more reasons and link to specific section(s) of your policy that may have been violated.
Policy agent is a tool to accelerate, not replace, human judgment.
Humans remain in control: Approvers and Admins can always choose to approve an expense even if the agent flagged it.
Feedback loop: Your users can send feedback with the thumbs up/down feature on specific flags raised by the agent or its lack thereof. This helps reporting when the agent was helpful or if its interpretation was inaccurate. It does not train the agent automatically.
Important: Your existing Airwallex settings (submission deadlines, approval routing, form requirements) always override the agent. I.e If a hard rule/setting is set on an expense, the Policy agent will not challenge it.
First time setup
The most powerful way to use Policy agent is to customise it with your own expense policies. Once configured, the agent uses expense policies as its source of truth for what is in or out of policy during review.
1. Customise your agent with your policy
Navigate to Expenses > Settings > Expense policy agent.
New policy: Either upload source documents from your company, or generate a policy based on best practices. You can review and edit the expense policy before publishing. Follow our dedicated set up guide here.
Activation: The agent begins enforcing your specific rules immediately once the policy is published. Your expenses policies are the agent’s knowledge for what’s in or out of the policy during review.
2. Baseline protection without a policy
If you haven’t edited an expense policy yet, Policy agent is still automatically enabled for all Grow and Accelerate customers to enforce baseline compliance, such as detecting duplicate receipts and other obvious issues. You can rely on this default behaviour from day one, then unlock deeper, policy-specific checks as soon as you upload your own policy file.
Controls
Two level of controls are built in with your policy agent.
If your organization would like to stop policy agent from evaluating your expenses, use the top-level setting:
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Configure your AI policy agent to evaluate expenses: enabled
click edit
select Disable
click checkmark and confirm
Your policy agent will be disabled and will no longer evaluate expenses. Previous evaluations and your active policies are preserved.
If you would like to change who can see AI evaluations, a visibility control is live while the agent is enabled. By default visibility is set to all users: all your employees and approvers will see flags and verifications. To edit this control:
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Who can view policy agent evaluations: all users
click edit
select Expense admins
click checkmark and confirm
Your policy agent is now restricted to show evaluations only to your Admins and Owner roles.
FAQs
What are AI agents?
AI agents are task-focused AI capabilities designed to handle specific finance workflows. Each agent supports a defined job, such as matching receipts, extracting invoice details, flagging unusual spend, or guiding setup. They work autonomously to reduce errors and manual work across expenses and accounts payable.
How does the agent handle data privacy?
Airwallex takes privacy seriously. Information we collect and retain is governed by the standard Airwallex Privacy Policy.
When you add a policy:
We convert it into "AI-friendly" logic.
We automatically remove sensitive data and unusable clauses during this process.
Your policies, flags, user feedback and all business data are NOT used to train any model.
What languages does the Policy agent support?
Airwallex Policy agent is designed for global teams. It can read receipts and policy documents in multiple languages, not just English.
If an employee submits a receipt in a foreign language (e.g., French, Chinese, Japanese), the agent will translate and interpret the context to verify compliance.
The agent's flags and reasoning will be presented in the language of your user, ensuring you understand the issue regardless of the receipt's origin.
Can I apply different policies to different international entities?
As a global platform, we know that a single policy rarely fits all subsidiaries. You have full flexibility to manage scope:
Global baseline: You can own a master policy that applies to "All entities" to verify fundamentals.
Entity-specific rules: You can edit different policies for individual entities. This is particularly useful for handling local tax nuances.
Local exceptions: If you have a generally global policy with minor local variations, you can use hidden notes to prompt the agent with specific exceptions (e.g., "For Japan employees only, allow taxi expenses after 10 PM").
Follow our dedicated policy editing guide here.
How can I specify exceptions?
You may have "gray areas" or specific context that approvers know, but aren't explicitly written in the employee handbook (e.g., "The $50 dinner limit doesn't apply to the Sales team during client closing week").
You can add Hidden notes to your Policy agent:
These notes are only visible to Admins.
They are never revealed to employees.
They help the agent make smarter decisions by handling exceptions without cluttering your public policy.
To add a hidden note, use the policy editor: create a new section and transform it to a "hidden note".
Follow our dedicated policy editing guide here.
Can I test a policy before it goes live?
You can control who can access evaluations by your Policy agent.
While testing a policy, we recommend giving visibility only to Expense admins: your employees and approvers will not see Policy agent and its evaluations.
How can I track my agent's performance?
You can monitor the activity and accuracy of your Policy agent by reviewing the outcomes and the feedback for each of the expense policies individually. Go to Expenses > Settings > Expense policy agent and look at “View activity” menu in any of your policies:
Agent evaluations: This tab lists all the last AI evaluation of any given expense item submitted in your organization. Use it to review flags and identify misunderstandings.
Feedback: This tab will bring you all positive and negative feedback submitted by users of your organizations. Use it to uncover how to improve your expense policy.
How can I enable approval with Policy agent?
Early access feature.
You can enable approval by treating the Policy Agent as an approver within your existing card expense or reimbursement approval workflows. To set this up:
Navigate to your Settings > Spend approvals and edit a workflow.
In the "Approval steps" dropdown, select Policy Agent to insert it into the workflow.
Designate a Human Approver who will review any expenses the Agent flags.