Visa, BILL and Billtrust pilot AI agents for automated B2B invoice payments
Visa, BILL and Billtrust pilot AI agents for automated B2B invoice payments #
Visa, BILL and Billtrust have launched what the companies describe as the first live pilot to allow trusted artificial intelligence agents to carry out end-to-end B2B invoice payments through supplier portals, removing a persistent manual step that has resisted accounts-payable automation.
The announcement was made on October 20, 2026, at Money20/20 in Las Vegas. The pilot draws on Visa’s Intelligent Commerce portfolio, including the Visa Trusted Agent Protocol and Agentic Directory, which enable an AI agent to be registered, credentialed and securely authenticated before accessing a supplier portal, eliminating the need for shared login credentials that have historically blocked full automation.
In the workflow being tested, BILL’s Payment Agent, registered through Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, uses tokenized payment credentials and buyer-approved payment controls to initiate card payments against specific supplier invoices. When the payment arrives at Billtrust’s portal, Billtrust uses the same protocol to recognize and authenticate the agent before granting access, allowing the transaction to complete without a human employee manually entering data into the portal.
Visa SVP Mark Nelsen said the pilot addresses a practical problem for businesses: “Businesses should not have to choose between automation and control when making payments.” Nelsen said the trial is testing how identity, payment controls and transaction visibility can be made to work reliably across platforms.
BILL, which counts nearly 500,000 businesses on its platform, has long offered invoice automation but says supplier portals have remained a friction point requiring human sign-in to finalize payment. SVP of Payments and Financial Services Archana Prasad said the integration is designed to return time to finance teams without sacrificing accuracy or security.
For Billtrust, whose network spans more than 20 million buyers and roughly $1 trillion in annual trade credit volume, the appeal is faster portal payments within existing acceptance policies, with full visibility over how payments are processed and reconciled. Billtrust SVP Kunal Patel emphasized that the protocol preserves supplier control, describing trust and accountability as prerequisites for agentic commerce to advance.
The pilot is part of Visa’s Intelligent Commerce strategy, which aims to embed payment infrastructure into AI-driven business workflows. How widely the model scales will depend on how readily other buyer and supplier platforms adopt the Trusted Agent Protocol and how quickly enterprise finance teams grow comfortable delegating payment execution to credentialed AI agents.
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