Fintech Ramp Launches Money-Saving AI Tools for Enterprises – Microsoft CEO Announces, More Like Investors

ONEs world’s biggest companies are swarming around artificial intelligence, business credit card and expense management startup Ramp is leveraging technology to dive deeper into customer savings — joining a small but growing wave of fintech firms jumping on the bandwagon for customer service, automation and more.

Launched on Thursday, Ramp Intelligence has a suite of services that use OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology to analyze software prices, scan email receipts, audit expense reports and respond to customer inquiries – not unlike the popular ChatGPT service itself.

“Too many people coming to [software-as-a-service] suppliers, it’s very difficult these days to know you’re getting a good price,” says Ramp’s co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman, 33, Forbes of the company’s new AI-powered contract analysis tool. “Often your only recourse is to go to a pricing site that may not tell you anything, or ask around.”

With GPT-4, Ramp can take supplier contracts that companies upload and automatically extract details such as prices and software seats. The service then compares the prices with anonymized data from the nearly $1 billion some 15,000 companies spend on Ramp each month to show how the quoted price compares to market averages on a graph – and say whether it’s a good deal. If it isn’t, Ramp can go back to vendors and negotiate prices using their data as leverage. Much of this is because GPT-4 has been trained to understand and interpret large amounts of text, so Ramp Intelligence can use it to scan through a contract’s fine print and understand the context – whereas older AI technology has not been as reliable with messy , unstructured text. Although some companies are already using artificial intelligence (and GPT-4) to help lawyers analyze contracts, Glyman says he believes Ramp is the first company to bring price data at scale to consumers.

Concurrent with the announcement, Ramp reveals MicrosoftMSFT
CEO Satya Nadella, who led the acclaimed tech giant through its $10 billion investment in OpenAI in January, has come on board as a Ramp investor and advisor, along with Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, Instacart CEO Fidji Simo and Stanford AI Lab professor Chris Ré. Ramp would not disclose the size of their investment, but the four founders join a number of venture investors, including Founders Fund, D1 Capital Partners and Coatue Management.

Other new Ramp AI offerings announced Thursday include a chatbot offering cost-cutting advice (using spending data to answer questions like “How can I cut operating costs?”) and a Gmail and Microsoft Outlook integration that automatically identifies and scans email receipts to process expenses in real-time – while flagging unusual transactions (like a late-night UberUBER
).

Ramp’s AI launch follows a number of corporate giants diving into the buzzing technology, many through their own search engine chatbots. However, a small wave of fintech startups has also jumped on the bandwagon. Fintech giant Stripe, one of Ramp’s investors, in March launched a tool using GPT-4 to help developers search company documents and get summarized answers – effectively allowing them to cut down on time spent reading. A month earlier, Navan, the travel and expense management startup formerly known as TripActions, debuted a customer service chatbot named Ava using OpenAI to field questions from travelers and corporate finance teams.

Others have used artificial intelligence since launch, such as UpstartESTABLISHMENT
to distribute loans, and Sentilink to catch identity fraud. Founded in 2019, Ramp, which was valued at $8.1 billion last March, has also used artificial intelligence since day one, analyzing transaction data to flag wasted spending on duplicate subscriptions or sudden spikes in spending. So far, Ramp claims the technology has helped the average customer shave 3% off their spending each year, potential savings of about $300 million based on annual volume of $10 billion.

With the latest suite of tools, that could increase “very meaningfully” as Ramp analyzes spending over the next few months, Glyman says.