AI-Driven Approvals

Microsoft 365 roadmap 573255 · Expense Agent · in preview · roadmap status “In development”, phase General Availability

What Microsoft says

Expense Agent can validate submitted expense reports against approval policies written in natural language and provide approvers with guidance during the review process. After an employee submits an expense report, the system evaluates both the overall report and the individual expense lines to detect potential policy violations, suspicious patterns, or situations that might require closer attention. This process supports policies that aren’t limited to exact thresholds or fixed numeric conditions, such as when business class travel is allowed, what qualifies as an appropriate business meal, or when exceptions to preferred hotel standards might be acceptable. The result is additional review context that helps approvers make better-informed decisions without replacing the final human approval step. By running policy validation after submission, the feature can apply controls at the level of a single expense line in the first release. The feature complements existing approval workflows by highlighting issues, providing context, and helping organizations enforce policy consistently while keeping approvers in control of the final decision.

Dates

• General availability: December CY2026 (2026 release wave 2)
• Public preview: October CY2026
• On the roadmap since 2026-09-30, last changed 2026-09-30

Covered by

Matched by Haiku among videos and Learn pages in the same galaxy system, checked against the roadmap ids and the evidence text. Every link below was reviewed by Opus.

Videos

• Microsoft presents: Behind the scenes of how we build the new Expense Agent: Expense Policies at 62:25
• Introducing: Expense Agent in Business Central (2026 release wave 1): Policy-based approval process at 11:58
• What’s new in Expense Agent: Improved Approval Process (2026 release wave 2): AI-driven approval policies at 0:53
• What’s new in Expense Agent: Travel and Expense Policy Automation (2026 release wave 2): Evaluate compliance with AI at 0:35; Policy validation with free text rules at 0:49; Policy compliance flagging at 3:09
• Introducing: Expense Management (2026 release wave 1): Expense approval workflow at 3:54
• Expense Agent: Approvals (2026 release wave 1): Expense Agent policies at 5:13
• What’s new in Expense Agent: Overview (2026 release wave 2): AI-Driven Travel Expense Policy Compliance at 5:00; Policy Flagging for Non-Compliant Expenses at 6:18

Microsoft Learn

• Approve or Send Back Expense Reports
• Understand Policy Compliance in Expense Agent
• Set Up Expense Management in Business Central

Source: Microsoft 365 roadmap. Status words follow the roadmap.