As expected, 2025 was a transformative year for business payments, with artificial intelligence (AI) moving into daily workflows and more businesses focused on vendor onboarding and embedded payments. For the larger accounts payable (AP) teams, the back half of the 2020s is shaping up to bring even more rapid improvements as automation, standards, and security expectations continue to rise.
With 2026 well under way, there’s 11-plus months of acceleration ahead. Buckle up and I’ll walk you through the four trends I expect to have the greatest impact on AP this year.
1. Supplier Enablement and Business Payments Networks Become ROI Drivers
“We can pay vendors using digital payments” sounds great. “We can enroll suppliers at scale, match payment type preferences, and provide genuine value that increases adoption” sounds even better. Payment providers who don’t offer enhanced security, efficiency, and above all vendor value risk both falling behind and dragging their customers with them.
For Chief Financial Officers seeking ways to create a leaner, more effective AP function, using B2B payments networks that focus on vendor enrollment and value can put organizations is a much stronger position competitively.
Businesses should prioritize partners that offer enhanced ACH payments and virtual card payments, structured remittance data for faster reconciliation, and tools like better invoicing in addition to secure payment rails. Doing so with payments providers who also specialize in vendor onboarding instead of simply doing it as an afterthought can drive efficiencies and rebate opportunities that might otherwise be difficult to unlock through traditional methods.
2. Automated Invoicing and Invoice Standards Gain Steam
Mandates haven’t arrived in the United States just yet, but the day will come. Everywhere else, 2026 is a pivotal year: multiple countries are moving from post‑audit to clearance/e‑reporting (Peppol, EN 16931, local platforms) and tightening real‑time validation. Belgium and Croatia started B2B mandates on the New Year, France kicks off a phased B2B e‑invoicing + e‑reporting in September; Poland’s KSeF goes live sometime this year, and several countries already have Peppol mandates.
If you can’t automate invoicing, not only in terms of capture and send but in terms of formatting, access points, archiving, and compliance checks, you’ll be falling behind. More than that, by 2030 you’ll likely be drowning in manual work just to avoid problems and, potentially, serious fines.
By employing invoice automation that takes care of compliance requirements, you’ll be compliant with emerging US mandates before they arrives, instead of scrambling to retrofit processes under pressure.
3. AP AI begins to Move from Assists to Agentic
If I can be candid, most AI solutions are still point solutions. That’s not a knock on technology so much as an acknowledgement of its limitations. AI is great at invoice capture and coding and spotting suspicious patterns in payments and logins, but not so good at handling core processes from start to finish.
That should begin to change in 2026. The outsized investment in AI, the steady evolution in capabilities, and the increasing mastery of the technology from finance teams mean opportunities for major advancements. I’m expecting routing approvals, resolving exceptions, predicting cash needs, and flagging anomalies to all become part of AI’s toolkit in many organizations, with so-called agentic AI shrinking cycle times, improving straight-through processing, and better protecting payments.
We know that Ardent Partners found that 44% of businesses report that they’re using AI and 65% want to use it to increase automation; that opportunity is finally here. Teams that embrace AI’s power can turn a lot of their attention away from handling transactions to cash management and supplier strategy. If there’s a human in the loop to ensure processes are working as they should, AI could prove to be a time-saving boon on a level we haven’t seen since workflow automation first came to the fore.
4. Layered Fraud Prevention Becomes Mandatory
We all know that Business Email Compromise (BEC) and account takeovers are a massive problem for businesses, with 79% of organizations reporting an attack in 2024. Fraudsters can now use AI to deliver more realistic emails, generate deepfake videos and calls, and deploy personalized phishing attempts with the level of sophistication that marketers employ personalized campaigns. AI is making that much easier.
AP is a prime target because the function is so critical to moving payments. Without partnering with and/or deploying a layered security solution that rolls out multi-factor authentication (MFA), geofencing, anomaly detection, and full vendor validation, businesses are at near-constant risk of fraud incidents that can escalate quickly and carry significant financial and reputational consequences.
While AI is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution, particularly around detecting suspicious behavior and login attempts. Those businesses who choose to keep that work in-house or skip it entirely will increase their risk of fraud considerably in 2026.
By the time we sing Auld Lang Syne in 2027—I'm already warming up my voice—I firmly believe businesses will either have adapted to these sea changes or will be smarting from their failure to do so. If you’re one of the businesses who are already adopting technology and processes to respond to these AP trends or plan to do so before the end of 2026, let us know!