New technologies are usually discussed in terms of what they can do: their intelligence, their speed and their ability to remove friction. Far less attention goes to what must sit underneath them for them to work safely, at scale and in the real world. According to Tieto, that blind spot is now emerging in payments as agentic AI gains ground.

Over the past year, AI agents have moved quickly into invoice matching, payment exception handling and even autonomous transaction initiation. Forrester has identified agentic AI as a key differentiator in accounts payable automation, with leading teams achieving 60–80% touchless invoice processing.

Tieto, which works at the meeting point of corporates, banks, ERP systems and payment providers, argues that speed alone is not the full picture. If underlying data is inconsistent, bank formats vary or ERP connectivity is patchy and manually maintained, AI simply reaches a faster decision on a weak foundation. When money is moving, a faster wrong decision is no improvement.

For years, corporates and ERP providers have relied on point-to-point connections to each bank and payment provider, Tieto said. That approach worked when counterparties were few and change was slow. Today, the ISO 20022 migration, demand for real-time visibility, a widening range of payment methods and the rise of data-hungry AI systems are combining to create complexity that traditional connectivity was never built to handle.

Connectivity asks whether one system can talk to another. Orchestration asks whether an expanding network of banks, ERPs, corporates, payment providers and AI agents can interact in a governed, auditable and reliable way, without each participant rebuilding the same plumbing.

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