Allen Bonde, Chief Marketing Officer at TreviPay, argues that a new generation of digital-native buyers is the biggest force reshaping how businesses buy and pay. Accustomed to frictionless consumer experiences, they expect the same convenience and omnichannel consistency from their suppliers. They are also more open to alternatives like stablecoins, net terms modeled on consumer BNPL, and AI as a co-creator. Sellers, meanwhile, are working to retain and keep their best customers happy in a tight macro environment, where the cost of capital puts pressure on businesses to extend credit and get paid faster.
Most AI in B2B today plays a supporting role, helping with credit decisions, research, and price checks, rather than enabling fully autonomous, agent-to-agent buying, according to Bonde. The challenge is adapting consumer-oriented agentic models to B2B’s complexity, which includes contract pricing, flexible payment terms, and country-specific compliance. That, he says, demands shared infrastructure built through partnerships with payment networks and banks, an approach that also underpins TreviPay’s Crossroads B2B Payments Conference in Kansas City November 8-10th.
Key insights
- Trevipay’s research with Murphy Research shows that payment choice builds loyalty, but it only lasts if suppliers improve purchasing, invoicing, and collections.
- Today’s AI agents mainly support humans, with greater autonomy most plausible for routine purchases like replenishment.
- Loyalty, payment choice, and good experience matter whether or not bots are involved.
- Marketers need to feed generative AI engines accurate information about their products, values, and differentiators, much as they once optimized content for SEO.
- Buying groups, varied payment methods, settlement, and VAT collection explain why B2B hasn’t adopted these models yet.
- Banks, payment networks, and fintechs need to build shared infrastructure together to make these models work at scale.
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