Visa, BILL (NYSE: BILL) and Billtrust launched what they describe as the first live pilot for automating business-to-business invoice payments with AI agents on October 20, 2026, and it is already processing real transactions.
The pilot went live in Las Vegas. Its pitch is that an agent can handle the payment process end to end without the manual logins and verification steps that typically stall automation in accounts payable.
How the pilot works
The setup has three layers, each supplied by a different company.
Visa provides the trust framework. The pilot runs on Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, part of its Intelligent Commerce portfolio. It gives merchants and portals a way to recognize which AI agents are legitimate before letting them transact.
BILL supplies the agent itself. Its AI-powered Payment Agent registers with Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol using tokenized credentials. A tokenized credential swaps the real card or account number for a stand-in, so the sensitive details never travel with the payment.
Billtrust provides the other side of the transaction. Suppliers in the pilot are authenticated through Billtrust’s portals, which is where BILL’s agent arrives to settle invoices.
Payments run on buyer-approved controls, and no one has to share login details with the agent. Suppliers keep visibility into and control over the payments landing in their portals.
The transactions moving through the pilot connect BILL’s customer base of nearly 500,000 businesses with suppliers that use Billtrust’s portals.
Why supplier portals are the bottleneck
Many suppliers require buyers to log in to their own portals to pay. Each portal has its own credentials, its own verification steps and its own quirks. The workaround in the past might have been to hand automation tools a set of login credentials, which creates a security problem. Shared logins are precisely what fraud teams lose sleep over.
The pilot attempts to solve both at once. Tokenized credentials replace shared passwords, and Visa’s protocol gives portals a way to verify the agent itself rather than trusting whoever happens to know the password.
BILL has surpassed $2 trillion in cumulative total payment volume as of October 2026, and it processes roughly $1 billion in payments daily.
BILL flagged about $1.5 billion in mistaken or unusual payments during fiscal year 2026. That figure matters here, because letting software pay invoices raises an obvious question about who catches the mistakes.
Leaders at BILL emphasized security and trust as central to the new payment system. Executives at the companies have also pointed to the potential to remove friction from the process and speed up how quickly suppliers get paid.
What this means
The risks are the ones you would expect when software starts spending money. Buyer-approved controls only work if the rules are set correctly, and a misconfigured agent could move funds faster than a human ever could.
There is also a coordination challenge. The pilot works because three companies agreed on how agents should identify themselves and how credentials should be handled. Broader adoption would depend on more portals, processors and payment platforms accepting the same kind of framework.
All three companies have said they are interested in exploring further uses for agentic payments.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.