Visa, BILL and Billtrust Launch AI Agent Pilot for B2B Invoice Payments

The pilot addresses a specific bottleneck in B2B payments: the manual input of payment details into supplier portals. By deploying AI agents that utilize Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, the system is designed to bypass traditional human authentication requirements, such as CAPTCHA, and eliminate the need for sharing supplier-portal login credentials. This approach targets a process that has historically limited the extent of automation in B2B transactions.

The process begins with BILL’s Payment Agent using Visa’s protocol and Agentic Directory, employing tokenized payment credentials to initiate card payments for BILL’s customers. Billtrust then authenticates the AI agent, granting it access to the supplier’s payment portal. A key operational constraint is that these AI agents do not independently decide which invoices to pay; they only execute payments that buyers have already explicitly approved, ensuring buyer control over expenditures.

For the nearly 500,000 businesses that BILL states rely on its platform, the pilot aims to reduce the time finance teams spend on manual payment entry. Suppliers utilizing Billtrust could benefit from potentially faster payment reception and improved cash flow, as the system is designed to recognize and accept payments from authenticated AI agents while maintaining existing payment acceptance policies and preserving necessary transaction reconciliation data.