Amex doubles down on AI for businesses

• Key insights: Amex released a new business premium card. 
• What's at stake: The payment company is selling to clients that face pressures due to the Iran war and political uncertainty. 
• Forward look: Amex also plans a new suite of AI-powered business tools in the coming months. 

With artificial intelligence taking over more of consumer and corporate life, American Express is embedding new versions of machine learning into its corporate payments menu. 

Amex on Wednesday launched a new Graphite Business Cash card, the start of a pipeline of more than a half-dozen business-focused products over the next year. Much like other payment companies, Amex is betting on advancements in agentic and generative AI to feed a new generation of financial services and payment options.  

"We are embarking on an era in which AI-powered agents can discover products and services, make decisions, and complete transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses, from booking travel and making dinner reservations to replenishing business inventories, managing expenses, and completing payments autonomously," said Amex CEO Steve Squeri in his note to shareholders, which was also released Wednesday. 

Amex's pipeline

The new card is live, and will be followed by other launches. Amex plans to introduce a platform that combines card and expense management, business employee expenses, physical and virtual card issuance, spending insights, and connections to enterprise resource planning and human resource systems. 

"AI will be a big part of how we develop new payment and spend management," Raymond Joabar, group president of global commercial services at American Express, told American Banker.

In April, Amex plans to publish the American Express Agentic Commerce Experiences — or ACE — developer kit, which is designed to enable users to integrate Amex's payment technology into their agentic experiences. 

For U.S. commercial customers, Amex also plans to embed AI capabilities into a suite of products the institution will launch later this year as part of its broader commercial product road map. This will include an AI agent that provides payment analysis, and an app that will help automate expense reporting for employees.

Additionally, Amex will offer a $300 ChatGPT business credit for U.S. business platinum and gold cards. Other pending AI-related products include an Insights Agent for corporate customers that is designed to help corporate customers to create reports with insights and analysis into their spending, leveraging data across cards, expenses, accounts payable, and other information. And an expense app will manage employee spending and reporting. 

"All of this will simplify the back office," Joabar said.  

The new business tools come on the heels of Amex's acquisition of business technology company Center in 2025 and is also related to a broader expansion in B2B payments at the company. 

"Users want payment flexibility in a complicated world," Joabar said. "A lot of them are waiting on payments from their own customers and need ways to manage that with their own expenses." 

A volatile world

Like all businesses, Amex is managing the impact of the war in Iran and other elements of political instability, such as tariffs and regulatory uncertainty in launching new products.

"Rising oil prices are yet another shock to operating margins that small businesses need to contend with," Ben Johnston, COO of Kapitus, a small-business lender and marketplace, told American Banker. "Over the course of the year, small businesses learned how to navigate these tariffs, altering supply chains and onshoring as much production as possible in an effort to avoid the tariff's most painful effects."

With oil climbing above $100 per barrel, small businesses are once again grappling with the impact of an unforeseen growth of expenses and agonizing over whether to pass these increased costs on to an increasingly stretched customer base, Johnston said.

"The uncertainty caused by a sudden spike in oil prices and the lack of clarity as to the severity and duration of the spike will likely cause many small businesses to retrench, holding off on starting new projects, taking on new hires, and investing in the growth of the business, until the picture becomes clearer," he said. 

Amex has traditionally taken a long-term view on its business lending strategy, with management saying short-term pressure from tariffs or other geopolitical risks do not dramatically alter product and technology development road maps. Amex performed a premium consumer card refresh in 2025, which was also a volatile year politically and economically.

"We're seeing the resilience of businesses, with everything going on in the world," Joabar said. "We're seeing them plugging away."

Analysts said selling tools that enable businesses to control operations is a key element of Amex's success in the business category.  

"Pressure is primarily concentrated in the middle-market business as certain categories moved off-card and given the importance of expense management capabilities," analysts at William Blair said in a research note on Amex. 

Amex's focus on higher-end consumer customers also shields the broader company from risks due to economic cycles, according to an analysis from Fitch ratings. 

"In downturns, AXP's primarily affluent customers have continued to spend while generating lower charge-offs than peers," Fitch said in an analyst note.