Visa, BILL and Billtrust have started a live pilot in which AI agents pay approved supplier invoices from start to finish, working directly through suppliers’ own payment portals. The three companies call it the first live pilot of its kind. Many of those portals have required a person to log in and type in the payment by hand.
The companies announced the pilot in a joint release on Tuesday. It is already processing real transactions between buyers on BILL and suppliers on Billtrust.
How the payment works
How do AI agents pay supplier invoices?
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 tokenized card credentials, within limits set by the buyer’s approved payment instructions.
On the supplier side, Billtrust uses the same Visa protocol to recognize and authenticate the agent. That check can replace the CAPTCHAs and other bot-blocking tools that such portals use. The agent needs no separate login.
Do AI agents decide what to pay?
The companies stress that the agent does not decide what to pay. It only completes payments the buyer has already approved, and buyers no longer have to share their supplier-portal logins.
Mark Nelsen, head of product for commercial and money movement solutions at Visa, framed the project around control. “Businesses should not have to choose between automation and control when making payments,” he said.
The companies describe the portal step as one of the last manual parts of accounts payable. For buyers, automating it spares finance teams from keying in payments by hand. For suppliers, it means faster card payments and, the companies say, quicker cash collection.
Archana Prasad, BILL’s senior vice president of payments and financial services, pointed to the friction the portals create. “For too long, supplier portals have been friction points, requiring a person to manually complete what should be an automated step,” she said.
BILL says nearly 500,000 businesses use its platform. Billtrust says its buyer network includes more than 20 million buyers and $1 trillion in annual trade credit volume.
Kunal Patel, senior vice president of payments at Billtrust, said the category depends on trust. “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,” he said.
Visa has worked on agent payments before. In September, it joined Mastercard and Ant International on checking the identity of AI agents. Separately, on Tuesday, Stripe and Sierra let AI agents take payments during customer calls.
The companies did not release transaction numbers for the pilot or a date for a wider launch. They said they will keep exploring agentic payments as the pilot continues.
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