Agentic Commerce Finds Traction in B2B Payments

Payment innovations typically start by doing their best to answer three key questions. Can money move faster, more cheaply, with fewer human touches?

The rise of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems, however, is moving those goalposts. As AI-driven systems begin to act with increasing autonomy, the central issue is no longer how payments move, but why they move at all.

Intent has become the foundation, and in consumer settings, the concept of agentic payments has gained traction relatively quickly, particularly across eCommerce and retail. The underlying logic is straightforward. A user expresses a preference, such as replenishing a household item when supplies run low, and the system acts within narrowly defined parameters. The system’s authority is bounded, and the user’s intent is typically uncomplicated.

That goes out the window when it comes to B2B payments, which operate under fundamentally different conditions. The intent that governs a corporate payment is rarely singular, explicit or stable. It is embedded in contractual obligations, internal controls, liquidity management strategies, regulatory requirements and informal judgments about counterparties and timing.

In B2B payments, intent is neither shallow nor contained. This means agentic transactions could force enterprises to confront questions they have long deferred such as, what do we optimize for when objectives conflict? How much discretion are we willing to delegate? And how do we ensure accountability when decisions are made at machine speed?

These questions cannot be answered solely by data science teams. They require collaboration between finance, legal, compliance and operations. For B2B enterprises, intent is organizational, not technical. Against that backdrop, finance teams are beginning to wonder whether agentic solutions might have a role to play in B2B, or if the situation is one of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

See also: What Agentic Commerce Can Learn From B2B Payments

At first glance, B2B payments might appear ripe for agentic automation. Invoices arrive, contracts specify terms and systems track due dates. But these surface signals mask deeper layers of intent that are rarely explicit.

The question confronting enterprises is not whether software can initiate payments autonomously, but whether organizational intent can be articulated with sufficient clarity and discipline to allow such autonomy without compromising control.

Consider a routine supplier payment. The contractual intent might be to pay net 30. The operational intent could be to preserve a strategic supplier relationship by paying early. The financial intent may be to delay payment to manage short-term liquidity. The risk intent might be to withhold funds pending a quality dispute. Each of these intents is legitimate, but they originate from different stakeholders and systems.

This is why the question of intent in B2B payments may ultimately be inseparable from governance. An agent cannot simply “optimize payments” without an explicit understanding of what optimization means for that organization at that moment. Cost minimization, working capital efficiency, supplier goodwill and compliance cannot all be maximized simultaneously. Someone, or something, must be responsible for deciding within a bounded decision set which objective takes precedence.

See also: Payments CEOs Weigh In on How Much Autonomy Is Too Much 

Enterprises already struggle with role-based access controls and approval matrices. Introducing agentic autonomy adds a new dimension: conditional authority that adapts to context.

Trust, in this setting, is not about whether the model is accurate in a statistical sense. It is about whether the organization is comfortable allowing a machine to act as a proxy decision-maker. That comfort depends on transparency and reversibility. Leaders need to understand not just what the agent did, but why it believed that action aligned with enterprise intent.

“If you trust AI blindly, you do so at your own peril. But if you ignore it … you do so at your own peril,” Boost Payment Solutions founder and CEO Dean M. Leavitt told PYMNTS in an interview.

The future of agentic B2B payments is not likely to arrive as a single leap to full autonomy. Just as paper checks still account for a substantial share of B2B volume, the embrace of autonomy may unfold through incremental delegation, bounded experiments and continuous refinement of intent models. Early successes could come from narrow use cases where incentives are aligned and risk is low. From there, organizations may expand the scope of autonomy as confidence grows.

“If you’re going to experiment with agentic AI or any type of AI solutions, you want to focus on two things. One is the area where you’re most likely to have success. And two, is there going to be a good return on that investment?” WEX Chief Digital Officer Karen Stroup told PYMNTS.

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