Visa, BILL and Billtrust have launched a live pilot that lets AI agents complete approved invoice payments through supplier portals. The trial is processing end-to-end transactions between participating buyers and suppliers.
The project targets a longstanding obstacle in business payments: supplier portals often require human authentication and manual data entry even after an invoice has been approved. In the pilot, an authorised BILL payment agent can initiate a card payment on a buyer's behalf, and Billtrust can recognise and authenticate that agent so the payment can be completed within the supplier portal.
The arrangement is designed for a narrow use case, not autonomous payment decision-making. The AI agent does not decide whether a payment should be made. It executes payments that the buyer has already approved and that remain subject to controls linked to that instruction.
The trial uses elements of Visa's Intelligent Commerce portfolio, including its Trusted Agent Protocol and Agentic Directory. These tools are intended to let a receiving platform recognise an AI agent and use tokenised payment credentials instead of shared supplier portal logins.
That matters because many accounts payable systems still break down at the final stage of payment submission. Finance teams may automate invoice capture, approval workflows and payment scheduling, but employees often still need to sign into supplier portals and manually enter payment details, particularly when anti-bot systems and login requirements block machine-driven access.
The pilot aims to remove that final manual step without handing control of payment decisions to software. The model ties payment controls to the customer's approved payment instruction, uses a payment path linked to a specific invoice, and gives both sides visibility into the transaction's authorisation and completion.
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