AI in Commercial Payments: Do Payables Bots Dream of Dynamic Discounts?

Artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape commercial payments by changing how businesses forecast cash, manage exceptions, interact with service providers, and execute transactions. This report explores how predictive, generative, and agentic AI may be applied across the source-to-settle value chain and what those applications could mean for commercial payments providers. It offers a structured framework that connects emerging AI capabilities to steps in the source-to-settle value chain, identifying where providers might face new cost pressures and risk of disintermediation but also opportunities to create new and differentiated services. As clients adopt AI more deeply into their finance operations, banks, networks, and fintechs will need to understand what they can do to preserve their relevance in the value chain. 

Preserving relevance will mean embedding into clients' AI-led processes by offering fit-to-purpose APIs and modular components that integrate with ERP and workflow systems. Providers should also supply development tools such as sandbox environments for testing agent behavior and co-pilots that assist with configuration, execution, and exception handling. At the same time, providers can benefit from cost savings by deploying agentic bots to handle predictable exceptions and generative chat tools to reduce servicing demands. New revenue opportunities may be unlocked by offering premium analytics based on bank or network-level data and positioning core infrastructure as the cost-effective solution for clients’ automation strategies. If history is any guide, the most successful providers will focus on enabling their customers' goals for AI rather than seeking to define them, by building tools that help clients deploy AI within their own operations. But for smaller customers without the capacity to develop their own solutions, providers can shape adoption by offering ready-to-use AI products informed by the needs and behaviors of their larger clients.