Accounts payable is entering a new era. After years of focusing on digitization and process automation, organizations are now applying artificial intelligence to improve decision-making, accelerate workflows, and transform AP into a more intelligent, data-driven business function.
This article series is based on the findings from State of AP 2026: AI Rising, a new research report sponsored by Medius and xSuite. Drawing on the perspectives of 194 accounts payable, P2P, and finance leaders, the research explores how organizations are adopting AI, where they are realizing the greatest value, the operational challenges they continue to face, and the capabilities that distinguish top-performing AP organizations.
Throughout this series, we’ll examine the report’s most important findings, including the current state of AP, emerging AI use cases, automation trends, AI readiness and maturity, and the strategies leading organizations are using to prepare for more autonomous finance operations. Whether your organization is beginning its AI journey or expanding existing initiatives, these articles will provide research-backed insights to help guide the next phase of AP transformation.
In Part Eleven of our series, we look at how ePayments now account for 63% of B2B payments, while electronic invoice submission has reached 51.7%, showing steady but uneven progress toward digital AP. Despite these gains, paper, PDFs, unstructured invoices, and supplier enablement gaps continue to limit full digitization and the foundation needed for broader automation and AI adoption. The article emphasizes that data stewardship is increasingly critical, because reliable, complete, and well-governed AP data enables AI to generate greater efficiency and insight, while poor-quality data can limit its value.
The Market in Motion: Paper, Electronic, and the Gap That Remains
The transition from paper to digital continues, although it remains uneven across the AP process. Electronic payments now account for 63% of all B2B payments, reflecting years of steady investment in ACH, virtual cards, commercial cards, and other digital payment methods. Paper checks continue to decline, but they remain part of many organizations’ payment mix.
Invoice processing tells a slightly different story. Electronic invoice submission has only recently become the majority method of receipt, with 51.7% of invoices now arriving electronically. While that represents meaningful progress, a substantial share of invoices still enters AP through paper, PDFs, email attachments, or other unstructured formats. For many organizations, supplier enablement remains one of the last major steps in completing the transition to a truly digital AP operation.
The picture that emerges is of a market moving steadily toward greater digitization rather than one undergoing rapid transformation. The digital foundation required for automation and AI is becoming stronger each year, but for many organizations, important work remains.
Organizational Capabilities: The Foundation AI Requires
Strong AP performance depends on more than technology. It reflects the capabilities that support it: disciplined processes, reliable data, effective supplier engagement, and the ability to turn operational information into meaningful business insight. As organizations expand their use of AI, these foundations become even more important.
The benchmark data throughout this report suggests that many organizations have made significant progress in modernizing core AP processes. Gaps remain, however, in areas such as data quality, supplier enablement, and analytics. These capabilities may not attract the same attention as new AI technologies, but they often determine how much value organizations ultimately realize from them.
Perhaps the most important capability in 2026 is data stewardship. Accounts payable manages one of the enterprise’s richest collections of financial and supplier information. When that data is complete, consistent, and well governed, AI helps organizations improve efficiency, strengthen decision-making, and generate new operational insight. When it is fragmented or unreliable, AI simply reaches conclusions faster using poorer information. Technology continues to advance rapidly. The quality of the data behind it remains the ultimate differentiator.
Access this exclusive research today by downloading the State of AP 2026: AI Rising report now.
