What's new in Expense Agent: Travel and Expense Policy Automation (2026 release wave 2)

Overview

The video walks through how Expense Agent checks expense reports against company travel and expense policies. Policies are entered as free text by category, and an “Evaluate compliance with AI” setting uses copilot credits to analyze them. The demo covers hotel and flight examples, the dashboard and compliance status, and the new flagged status for policies that were evaluated and found potentially non-compliant.

It also shows how submitters can run a policy check before submitting, how changes to an expense return policies to pending, and how the approver workflow handles flagged items. Two items are described as coming: more detailed receipt itemization, and a mandatory reason when an approver overrides a policy.

Key points

• “Evaluate compliance with AI” is a new toggle in the policy compliance settings. It can use copilot credits; the presenter says to check the documentation for updated pricing.
• Policies are free text and organized by category. When a category has several policies, enter each one as a separate line so the agent can analyze them one by one.
• Presubmission evaluation lets submitters click “check policies with AI” on their own report before submitting. It takes about a minute, and it can be turned off if you are concerned about AI credit usage.
• Expense reports get a new “flagged” status when a policy was evaluated and potential non-compliance was found, or when the receipt lacks the information to evaluate it. The approver then decides.
• Policies are evaluated against a specific version of the receipt. If an expense is modified, its status goes back to policies pending and a new evaluation is needed. Submitters can still submit while policies are pending, and the system re-evaluated after submission in the demo.
• Policies are guidance for approvers, who can still override them and approve.
• No policy check runs if no policies are configured or if the expense record has not changed since the last evaluation.

Features

A status with a roadmap link comes from the Microsoft 365 roadmap feature this part of the video covers (matched by Haiku; links Opus dropped are not used); other statuses need a status word in the video itself.

Quotes

• 0:35 “evaluate compliance with AI, first of all, it’s a new feature that can use copilot credits. So um make sure you check our documentation”
• 0:49 “companies have policies that apply to expenses and some of the policies are not as easy to check. Um they cannot be automated in”
• 1:30 “you can also see that there’s multiple um possible expense policies for the same category. And the idea is every policy should be a”
• 3:09 “already marked as compliant but i also have some that have been marked as flagged this is a new status”
• 6:01 “So that’s also some new feature that is going to come soon. We plan to have more um itemization for receipts so that all”
• 7:06 “as a submitter, I can still submit an expense report even if policies are still pending.”
• 8:22 “we have upcoming that it’s going to be mandatory for the for the approver to actually specify a reason when they override a policy.”

Disclaimers in the video

• 0:35 subject-to-change: pricing regarding copilot credits for this feature - check documentation for updates
• 6:01 coming-later: Enhanced receipt itemization is a new feature that is going to come soon
• 8:22 coming-later: Mandatory policy override reason specification is upcoming and will be required for approvers

Presenters (as heard): Unknown presenter.