AI can now catch lies on your expense report

One employee traveling for work checked his dog into a kennel and billed it to his boss as a hotel expense. Another charged yoga classes to the corporate credit card as client entertainment. A third, after racking up a small fortune at a strip club, submitted the expense as a steakhouse business dinner. These bogus expenses, which occurred recently at major U.S. companies, have one thing in common: All were exposed by artificial intelligence algorithms that can in a matter of seconds sniff out fraudulent claims and forged receipts that are often undetectable to human auditors -- certainly not without hours of tedious labor. AppZen, an 18-month-old AI accounting startup, has already signed up several big companies, including Amazon, International Business Machines, Salesforce.com and Comcast, and claims to have saved its clients $40 million in fraudulent expenses.