Visa, BILL and Billtrust said on October 20 that they had launched a live pilot in which a registered AI agent completes buyer-approved invoice payments inside supplier portals. That step has usually needed a person on the buyer’s side to log in to each supplier’s portal and type in the payment details.
How the pilot works
According to the joint announcement, the BILL Payment Agent is registered through Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Agentic Directory. It issues card payments for supplier invoices on behalf of BILL’s customers, using tokenized payment credentials and controls aligned with the buyer’s approved payment instructions.
On the supplier side, Billtrust uses the same Trusted Agent Protocol to recognize the agent, authenticate it and let it into the portal to complete the payment. The companies say this agent authentication can satisfy the protections that CAPTCHA and other bot-blocking tools have provided, without a separate agent login. The supplier then accepts the payment under its existing acceptance policy.
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The release lists five controls built into the pilot: an authenticated agent acting for an identified buyer, tokenized credentials in place of shared portal logins, payment controls tied to the approved payment instruction, a payment path tied to the specific invoice, and visibility into authorization and completion. The pilot is processing end-to-end transactions with participating buyers using BILL and suppliers using Billtrust. The companies gave no transaction counts. For scale, BILL says nearly half a million businesses use its platform, and Billtrust says its buyer network includes more than 20 million buyers.
“Businesses should not have to choose between automation and control when making payments,” said Mark Nelsen, SVP and Head of Product, Commercial & Money Movement Solutions, Visa. Archana Prasad, SVP of Payments and Financial Services at BILL, described the problem the pilot targets: “For too long, supplier portals have been friction points, requiring a person to manually complete what should be an automated step.”
Why a payments pilot reaches the sales desk
The supplier portal belongs to the seller. It is where a B2B customer checks an invoice, pays it and often reorders, and many portals were built on the assumption that a person sits at the keyboard, with bot blocking treated as a security feature. This pilot gives a registered buyer agent a way through that front door, on terms the supplier sets.
Kunal Patel, SVP Payments at Billtrust, set out the condition for that: “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.”
Sellers have already started putting agents on their own side of the transaction. We covered vendors whose AI agents chase unpaid invoices as well as leads, and Salesforce’s argument that businesses need their own agents to greet personal AI agents. In the Visa pilot, a buyer’s agent completes a task inside the seller’s own system.
Buyers at machine speed
Christopher Shutts, Group Vice President of CRM Sales & CPQ at ServiceNow, expects the same shift to reach the front of the deal. In predictions for 2027 sent to SalesTech Edition by ServiceNow’s product public relations team, he said: “But as AI agents increasingly participate in purchasing decisions, sellers will face a new challenge: ensuring their quoting and pricing processes can accurately keep pace with buyers operating at machine speed.” ServiceNow sells CPQ software, which is the category he expects to carry that load.
“In 2027, CPQ will become increasingly important to how businesses compete in AI-driven commerce, helping sellers balance speed, accuracy, and profitability as more purchasing decisions involve autonomous agents or AI influenced omnichannel buyers,” Shutts said.
In our reading, the pilot’s controls are a usable template for sellers who will face buyer agents earlier in the cycle. The agent in the pilot acts only on an instruction the buyer has already approved, carries its own credential, and leaves a record tied to one invoice. A seller deciding whether a buyer’s agent may request a quote, accept a renewal or place a reorder can ask for the same three things: a known identity, a limit set by a person, and a record of what the agent did.
What it means for the sales leader
Ask your finance and accounts receivable teams which payment portal your customers use and how it treats automated traffic today. If it blocks every bot, a buyer agent registered through a protocol like Visa’s will need an explicit path in, and the decision about that path should include sales operations as well as finance.
Check how agent-initiated activity will show up in the CRM. A payment, reorder or quote request made by a customer’s agent is account activity that a rep and a customer success manager should see, with the name of the agent and the person who approved it.
Review the terms on your quotes and order forms. When a buyer’s agent pays or reorders under limits the buyer set, the payment methods, approval steps and price validity you put in the quote become the rules that agent follows.
Finally, list the steps in your own buying process that still assume a person: portal logins, emailed approvals, PDF quotes that must be signed. Each one is a place where a buyer agent stops, and the business behind it may pick the supplier whose process lets the agent finish.
