Spend management is an incredibly crowded market. It moves fast. Companies jump on market trends and roll them out as must-have features to their customers faster than it took for Southampton to get themselves relegated this season.

And my role means I get to see it all live. This is what I think we’ll see in 2025.

Trend 1: AI-powered spend optimisation becomes the norm

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming for spend management — shock…. In 2025, AI-driven automation will go beyond generating custom reports, simple expense categorisation, and fraud detection.

We’ll see a shift towards AI-powered spend optimisation where machine learning models analyse vast amounts of data to provide real-time cost-saving recommendations, predict supplier risks, and ensure compliance with internal spend policies.

For example, Zycus has developed AI agents that deliver real-time, actionable spend insights. These agents integrate data from multiple sources, continuously cleanse and enrich this data, and categorise spending with high precision. They also detect anomalies, forecast future spending trends, and assess supplier performance, empowering Procurement teams to make better informed decisions.

For CPOs and CTOs designing and prioritising their products roadmap, this means that AI is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a competitive differentiator against competition. Spend management providers that fail to harness AI features will likely fall behind, especially as customers demand smarter, more proactive tools to manage their finances.

Trend 2: CO2e tracking and reporting becomes essential

With global ESG regulations tightening — including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in Europe — businesses are under increasing pressure to track and report their own carbon emissions. For 2025, this means that spend management providers must evolve beyond standard financial reporting to begin incorporating spend-based CO2e calculations & reports into their own platform.

Why? Well, your own customers need this data. Otherwise, they must manually extract their own purchase data from spend platforms (such as invoices and expense receipts) in order to share it with Environmental Consultants, typically via Excel.

Not only does this cost spend management business customers huge amounts of money, with consultants charging hourly rates, but it costs them significant amounts of time too. To put it bluntly, spend-based ESG reporting is a massive pain.

So, given that spend management providers are already sitting on this customer data, they can instantly add a huge amount of value to their customers by making the associated CO2 data easily accessible, hence offering real-time visibility into a client’s indirect CO2 impact as a business.

Secondly, on top of regulation, thousands of businesses not subject to ESG mandates, such as companies outside California within the USA, still want to meet their own self-set net-zero targets. Without the ability to measure and track their spend-based CO2 emissions, this sustainability goal becomes either unrealistic or incredibly painful to achieve for any given organisation.

Furthermore, investors are now prioritising climate-conscious businesses and procurement teams are under increasing pressure to choose vendors who ‘box tick’ certain ESG requirements contained in their RFPs / success criteria.

This allows spend management providers to position themselves as indispensable partners in their own customers’ corporate sustainability strategies. We are also seeing that providers who fail to capture the demand for sustainability are experiencing customer churn, or drastically reduced RFP win rates.

Lastly, we’re seeing time and time again that those spend management providers which are proactive rather than reactive with their roadmap, incorporating ‘green features’, are seeing the financial return. Business customers want to see sustainability initiatives from their partners. By capturing this demand and differentiating their product offering they are seeing RFP win rates and deal win rates increase dramatically.

Overall, forward-thinking providers will embed emissions calculations into everyday spend tracking—giving customers CO2 impact reports alongside traditional expense and procurement data. This is no longer just an add-on feature; it’s becoming a core part of spend analytics.

Trend 3: The rise of integrated spend ecosystems

In 2025, the era of stand alone spend management solutions is coming to an end. Customers expect seamless integrations between Expense Management, AP Automation, Procurement, and Corporate Cards.

We’re seeing ever more how traditional Expense solutions, for example, are diversifying to launch their own invoicing or credit card products (Exhibit A: Payhawk). This shift towards ‘spend ecosystems’ allows providers to offer interconnected solutions that eliminate manual processes and enhance visibility across all spend categories.

This trend is driven by a demand for real-time, end-to-end visibility into corporate spend. Businesses no longer want separate tools for expenses, invoices, and procurement—they want a unified platform that provides a holistic view of financial data. Companies that embrace this ecosystem approach will win market share, while standalone solutions will struggle to stay relevant.

Staying ahead of the competition in 2025 and beyond

As spend management evolves, staying ahead of these trends will be crucial for your success in 2025. For forward-looking businesses ready to capture demand for CO2e tracking/reporting trends, and position yourself as a sustainability functionality leader within Spend Management, download our Business Spend Guide today to learn more about this trend.