BILL Eyes AI Agents for Small Business Payments

BILL’s new artificial intelligence agents are already delivering quantifiable results for small and medium-sized businesses, executives said Thursday (Nov. 6) during an earnings call.

The intelligent finance platform debuted its first AI agents on Oct. 28, saying they will autonomously collect and validate W-9s, reconcile receipts, accelerate user onboarding and carry out routine tasks for small businesses that are currently saddled with manual workflows.

These agents “deliver automation capabilities that are transforming financial workflows from manual to touchless,” BILL CEO and founder René Lacerte said Thursday during the earnings call.

Lacerte said BILL’s new agents are trained on the company’s dataset that includes over $1 trillion in transaction volume and 1.3 billion documents.

“We’re now leveraging this combination of scale, data and trust to power BILL’s agentic AI, purpose-built agents that go beyond traditional automation to deliver strategic finance capabilities and enable a future of truly touchless B2B transactions,” Lacerte said.

For example, BILL’s new agent that requests, collects and pre-validates W-9s on behalf of customers for all their new suppliers throughout the year, solves what Lacerte characterized as “one of the biggest pain points for SMBs during tax season.” The agent eliminates 80% of the manual steps involved in this process, Lacerte said.

One customer, an accounting firm, told BILL that this AI agent is saving the company a quarter of the time it used to spend processing W-9s. The firm collects and works on 1,500 W-9s from suppliers for its clients.

“They’ve been able to quantify already, just in the early days, that it’s a meaningful impact,” Lacerte said.

In addition to this agent, BILL’s new AI agents complete tasks in onboarding, support, and workflows such as vendor management, payments and receipt management, BILL President and Chief Operating Officer John Rettig said during the call.

“These new agents are just the beginning of our agentic journey,” Lacerte said. “We’re excited for customers to use them and to continue to leverage our scale and unparalleled expertise around SMB financial operations to develop more agents that eliminate workflows and the friction of doing business.”