Manual reviews and billing cycles have long tied up liquidity in supplier payments. Visa is developing a platform that uses agentic artificial intelligence to automate business-to-business transactions.
With help from BILL and Billtrust, Visa conducted a live pilot in which AI agents completed invoice payments through supplier portals. The process begins with an agent from BILL, a cloud-based platform that automates back-office operations for small-to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and banks.
After the buyer sets the payment parameters, BILL’s agent establishes tokenized payment credentials and transaction controls, then routes the payment through Visa’s Intelligent Commerce platform.
Billtrust, a fintech specializing in B2B accounts receivable automation, then uses Visa’s agentic protocol to authenticate and authorize the agent, enabling it to pay the invoice on the customer’s behalf.
Keeping Suppliers Paid and Engaged
Automating supplier payments could help businesses improve cash flow and reduce administrative workloads, particularly at smaller companies operating under tight budgetary constraints.
Accounts receivable and accounts payable processes at SMBs often require ongoing human involvement to review invoices, reconcile payments, and resolving exceptions. AI agents could automate parts of this work, improving efficiency while helping businesses maintain timely payments to suppliers—critical partners in their operations.
From Pilots to Practice
The Visa, BILL, and Billtrust solution is still in the pilot and testing stage. That reflects a broader challenge facing agentic commerce efforts: moving from controlled trials to real-world use requires substantial infrastructure and clear controls over how agents initiate and execute transactions.
Similar obstacles have slowed consumer-facing agentic commerce, in which shoppers delegate purchases to AI agents.
Still, there are signs that autonomous agents are gaining traction in narrower payment use cases. Transaction volume on the x402 protocol has increased, although most transactions are still micropayments worth less than a U.S. dollar.
Agentic commerce has yet to reach the mainstream, but the growing number of trials, tests, and pilots are a testament to the technology’s promise.
