Visa, BILL and Billtrust have started a live pilot in which AI agents pay approved supplier invoices from start to finish. The agents pay through suppliers’ own payment portals. The three companies call it the first live pilot of its kind.
Until now, many of those portals needed a person to log in and type in the payment. The companies announced the pilot in a joint release on Tuesday. The pilot is already processing real transactions between buyers on BILL and suppliers on Billtrust.
How the payment works
BILL handles payables for its business customers. Its payment agent is registered through Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Agentic Directory. The agent pays with tokenised card credentials, within limits set by the buyer’s approved payment instructions.
On the other side, Billtrust uses the same Visa protocol to recognise and authenticate the agent. That check can replace the CAPTCHAs and other bot-blocking tools such portals use. The agent needs no separate login.
The agent does not decide what to pay, the companies said. It only completes payments the buyer has already approved, and buyers no longer share their supplier-portal logins.
“Businesses should not have to choose between automation and control when making payments,” said Mark Nelsen, head of product for commercial and money movement solutions at Visa.
Why B2B payments
The companies describe the portal step as one of the last manual parts of accounts payable. For buyers, automating it saves finance teams from keying in payments by hand. For suppliers, it means faster card payments and, they say, quicker cash collection.
“For too long, supplier portals have been friction points, requiring a person to manually complete what should be an automated step,” said Archana Prasad, BILL’s senior vice president of payments and financial services.
BILL says nearly 500,000 businesses use its platform. Billtrust says its buyer network has more than 20 million buyers and $1 trillion in annual trade credit volume.
“Agentic commerce will only move forward if businesses can trust agents to operate across systems with the same clarity and accountability they expect from people,” said Kunal Patel, senior vice president of payments at Billtrust.
Visa has worked on agent payments before. In September it joined Mastercard and Ant International on checking AI agents’ identity. Separately, on Tuesday, Stripe and Sierra let AI agents take payments during customer calls.
The companies gave no transaction numbers for the pilot and no date for a wider launch. They said they will keep exploring agentic payments as the pilot continues.
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