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Slack integrates with SAP Concur for travel, expense bots

The bots will roll out separately, with expenses available in public beta today and the travel bot slated to arrive within the next few months.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor

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Workplace collaboration platform Slack announced on Wednesday that it's integrating with SAP's Concur for travel and expense bots on Slack.

The integration, which Slack says was one of the most requested features from its enterprise customers, will enable users to handle a bevy of travel and expense related tasks via conversational bots on the Slack interface.

For instance, the bots will give users the ability to approve expense reports right from Slack, upload expense receipts, search for and book flights, and create basic expense reports from within a bot chat.

From the SAP standpoint, the enterprise software giant said the bots will roll out separately, with expenses available in public beta today and the travel bot slated to arrive within the next few months. SAP bought Concur back in 2014 as part of a major portfolio expansion and has since managed to scale the platform to a wider customer base.

Read also: Slack's CSO calls for industry-wide security transparency

On an average busy day in the fourth quarter, SAP Concur processed more than 568,000 expense reports, saw 1.1 million receipts uploaded via Concur mobile, and booked more than 202,000 business trips.

As for Slack, the darling of the team collaboration space has garnered a lot of traction in the enterprise with more than nine million weekly active users, more than six million daily active users, and an international customer base that's 55 percent of the total. Slack has more than $200 million in annual recurring revenue and two million paid users.

Slack also has partnerships with Oracle, Google, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, which aim to make its platform a more neutral hub for for business tools and streamline workflows for users. The company said that more than 90 percent of its paid teams have apps installed on their Slack workspaces, and there are now more than 1,000 apps available from its directory.

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