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Every swipe, ACH transfer or virtual card transaction carries clues about who is spending, where money is moving, what is being bought and whether something looks wrong.

Those clues have remained relatively untapped, and not for lack of enterprise effort.

“The core problem is work happens in one place, and payments happen in another. People are stitching that together manually, which can create delays and errors as volume grows,” Ryan Taylor, SVP Product Management – Mobility & Payments at WEX, told PYMNTS during a discussion for the PYMNTS B2B Payments Event 2026 — Stopping B2B Fraud Before AI Moves the Money.

Artificial intelligence, Taylor said, could eliminate some of that stitching. But the bigger opportunity is to collapse the distance between detecting what should happen and safely executing it.

After all, AI systems are getting better at determining which invoice looks suspicious, where a fleet vehicle should refuel, whether a supplier price is drifting higher and which transaction deserves intervention. But identifying the right action is different from having the authority to take it, particularly when taking it means moving real corporate cash.

And that could just end up turning payments from the endpoint of an enterprise workflow into its control plane.

“Payment data is interesting because it really is the digital footprint of business,” Taylor said. “It tells you more than just what was spent.

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