Money Is Starting to Drive Itself

When Eric Glyman, the chief executive of Ramp, a company that sells corporate cards and software for tracking business spending, was asked what his ideal product would look like, the interviewer offered a phrase for it: literally self-driving money. Glyman replied that was well said.

What Glyman meant starts with something companies already do. In his telling, employees are limited agents of their companies. On a business trip, a worker has standing authority to book a hotel, take a car service, and go to dinner, but not to buy a $2 million Ferrari because he feels like it. That kind of purchase would need sign-off from the chief financial officer, and perhaps the board.

Ramp's argument, he said, is that this kind of authority is already becoming software. Companies write spending policies into its system, and the system enforces them when workers spend. He said some organizations already let large software contracts renew on their own each year, then send someone to check whether they still need them.

That check is starting to be done programmatically, he said, and in a few years it could be routine. Instead of asking one department after another whether 1,000 software logins are still being used, software will pull the usage data, compare the roughly $100 paid per login with going rates paid by other buyers, and decide whether to renew. Very quickly, Glyman said, "you'll have agents negotiating with agents to buy things on behalf of companies."

What he said he wants to build is an operating system that does more than record spending and help close the books. Part of what Ramp is working on, he said, is managing what companies pay for computing power on one side, and letting intelligence help allocate resources on the other, so the most worthwhile use gets the dollar.

The interviewer put the shift another way, as buying work rather than buying software seats, a description Glyman praised.