Emburse CEO Marne Martin Reveals How AI and Open Ecosystems Are Reshaping Corporate Travel and Expense Management

Marne Martin is the Chief Executive Officer of Emburse, where she leads the company’s strategy around AI-powered travel and expense management, connected financial workflows and real-time spend intelligence. She joined Emburse as CEO in January 2024, bringing more than 25 years of technology and business leadership experience across public and privately held software companies. Before Emburse, Martin spent more than five years at IFS, serving most recently as Chief Strategy Officer and President, following leadership roles including CEO of WorkWave and President of IFS Service Management. Earlier in her career, she served as CEO of ServicePower and CFO of Norcon. Her experience spans profitable growth, international expansion, M&A, strategic exits and corporate transformation. Martin holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and International Finance from Georgetown University, an MBA from Purdue University’s Krannert School of Business, and a Master’s in International Management from ESCP-EAP. At Emburse, she is focused on using AI, data and open technology ecosystems to give finance and travel leaders greater visibility, flexibility, control and proactive decision-making.

How are you feeling about the response at GBTA 2026 so far, and how are travel and finance leaders reacting to Emburse’s vision of an open, connected ecosystem?

The energy at the show was terrific, and it validates what we continuously hear from customers. Travel and finance leaders are tired of having to compensate for silos, but they also don’t want to part ways with what works and start from scratch to gain connectivity, choice, flexibility and control. What stuck with GBTA attendees is that Emburse isn’t asking them to pick a single, locked-in platform; instead, we’re giving them a way to connect travel, payment, and finance technologies in one intelligent experience. Our customers are happy they can work with a flexible ecosystem that has choice built-in, rather than being forced into choosing one TMC in order to enjoy the benefits of AI efficiencies across travel and expense. 

Emburse recently announced major partnerships with FCTG, Mastercard, TempoTrip, and World Travel, Inc. How does an open travel and expense ecosystem solve the problem of fragmented tools for corporate buyers?

Fragmentation isn’t caused by a technology capability problem; it’s a data problem that hasn’t been solved by siloed vendors who weren’t necessarily technology-first leaders to understand how to innovate across end-to-end travel and expense (T&E). Typically, travelers book, pay, or submit expenses across multiple systems, so it’s hard to get a complete data picture unless someone owns and manages the data and aggregates it for control and insights. Each partnership we announced at GBTA closes a gap that customers have been asking for as we continue to advance Travel and Expense in Motion. 

Whether we’re reducing manual work for booking travel or meetings/events, we’re also solving the need by providing what customers and buyers expect. Our expanded partnership with Mastercard embeds virtual cards, giving flexibility to work with preferred banking providers and making payment data easier to reconcile automatically rather than manually. 

Each partnership is solving a specific challenge. Together, they give buyers the flexibility to build a tech stack that works for their organization while getting a single connected view without being locked into a single vendor. 

With your new Cvent integration via Booking Insights with Emburse, how will corporate travel teams gain better intelligence inside hotel sourcing workflows during supplier negotiations?

Hotel sourcing is often negotiated based on incomplete data. Typically, buyers go into RFP season with spreadsheets and stale data, while suppliers have a deep understanding of their performance. 

Booking Insights with Emburse changes this. It puts Emburse Travel Analytics directly into the Cvent Travel sourcing workflow, giving teams access to transaction-level data regarding how a property or supplier has actually performed, all in one place and where they’re already managing negotiation efforts. 

This lets buyers identify hotels that deliver the best value, spot sourcing opportunities, and walk more confidently into negotiations with real data instead of anecdotes.

Your new strategic partnership with Direct Travel (Avenir, powered by Spotnana) brings AI and Expense Intelligence together. How does this simplify real-time decisions and duty-of-care tracking for travel managers?

Typically, travel and expense platforms only talk to each other at fixed checkpoints: when a trip is booked, or when an expense report is filed. Anything in between is a blind spot.  Our partnership with Direct Travel changes this. It allows Avenir, powered by Spotnana, and Emburse Expense Intelligence to continuously share live data (i.e., itinerary changes, booking activity, traveler preferences, payments, and receipts) in one place as trips progress. 

If you’re a travel manager, this means you no longer have to wait until reconciliation to understand where travelers are or how a trip has changed. This partnership gives them a real-time view as things happen, which is the kind of visibility duty-of-care tracking relies on. Expense and spend intelligence flows back to the travel side, so our AI guides travelers in the moment, not after the fact. It is a model for a different type of partnership.

Looking ahead, how is Emburse leveraging AI to transform expense management from a reactive, administrative chore into a proactive, strategic finance function over the next year?

In the past, expense management meant waiting for a trip or purchase to happen, and then piecing together what actually occured, days or weeks later. Life isn’t lived looking out the rear view mirror and neither should travel be managed that way. 

Emburse flips this approach. Emburse embeds AI and predictive insights directly into workflows, giving organizations the guidance they need to track spend accurately before money leaves the business. 

At Emburse, we leverage Emburse AI to help automatically complete expense reports, provide proactive policy guidance when booking travel in the moment, and give teams the finance and travel data they need in real-time. 

As the first and only dedicated T&E platform to achieve ISO/IEC 42001 certification, finance leaders can be assured that, as AI takes on more tasks, they remain compliant on the Emburse platform and their data is governed responsibly. 

Our goal for the next year is to lessen the time finance teams spend reconstructing what happened and focus on acting in the moment for greater spend control and visibility.