It took more than two decades, but the consumerization of enterprise software appears to have finally reached a tipping point.
Software companies successfully stripped clicks, training and complexity from workflows designed around the assumption that a human would still perform them.
Then came artificial intelligence, and agentic AI. The workflow has not disappeared, but the employee’s obligation to operate it has.
As a result, the unit of convenience in B2B is shifting from clicks and labor to outcomes and growth. Instead of opening procurement software, searching approved suppliers, checking budgets, creating a requisition and routing it for approval, an employee may tell an agent something like, “Equip the five new hires starting Monday, stay within our budget and follow company policy.”
The software stack becomes responsible for translating that intent into execution. Meta’s new Muse agent, released Tuesday (Sept. 8), shows how that transition is already beginning in consumer technology. AI is moving beyond answering questions toward performing tasks across applications. However, Meta’s Muse agent struggled with all three consumer tasks that PYMNTS tested it on.
Read also: Agentic B2B Is Here. Are Your Contracts and Invoices Ready?
B2B Is Filled With Rules, and That’s Becoming an Agentic Advantage
The consumerization of B2B has been relatively linear and tracked the growth of the software and tech sectors. Amazon conditioned employees to expect searchable catalogs, smartphones helped turn mobile access into an enterprise requirement, and consumer FinTech raised expectations around onboarding and financial visibility.
Agentic AI is creating a more demanding expectation. Why should the employee operate the software at all?
Someone accustomed to delegating personal travel planning to an agent may have little patience for navigating separate corporate travel, calendar, expense and approval applications. A business owner who delegates routine consumer purchases may wonder why replenishing inventory requires manually working through a procurement portal.
Consumerization is moving one layer deeper. It is no longer primarily about making enterprise software resemble consumer software. It is about importing the expectation that technology should translate an objective into a completed transaction.
See also: What Agentic Commerce Can Learn From B2B Payments
The irony is that enterprise technology may already possess much of the infrastructure necessary to make that possible because B2B firms are experts at encoding authority and approval step-ups across workflows and payments. ERP systems know budgets and cost centers, for example, while procurement platforms know approved vendors. Identity systems know roles, corporate cards know spending limits, and banks know payment permissions. Expense platforms know policy, while contracts establish commercial boundaries.
To humans, those systems can look like bureaucracy. To AI agents, they look like instructions.
“This isn’t a technical upgrade; it’s a governance revolution,” Kathryn McCall, chief legal and compliance officer at Trustly, told PYMNTS in June 2025, adding: “You’re messing with people’s money here.”
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“You’ve got to treat these AI agents as non-human actors with unique identities in your system,” McCall added. “You need audit logs, human-readable reasoning and forensic replay.”
“Can your agent initiate invoice creation but not approve disbursement without human review?” she asked. “What’s the scope? What are they allowed to do and what are they not allowed to do?”
Read also: 24/7 Money Means Treasury Needs to Figure Out Its Weekend Plans
The Enterprise Preview of Agentic B2B Can Be Found in Procurement
Procurement is particularly well positioned to become an early proving ground because the workflow combines something agents are good at, like searching, comparing and coordinating information, with something enterprises already understand, which is tightly defined authority.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Investment Impact of GenAI Operating Standards on Enterprise Adoption,” a collaboration with Coupa, found in March 2025 that 73% of companies were considering using AI in procurement.
The winning enterprise platforms may not have the most engaging interfaces. They may have the richest machine-readable context, strongest permission architecture, cleanest APIs and greatest ability to let agents safely execute actions across organizational boundaries.
“It’s not about abandoning legacy systems, but modernizing around them intelligently,” Garrett Baird, vice president of product, banking and FinTech at Paymentus, told PYMNTS in May.
Making the investments necessary to compete and win in the agentic era may not be the easiest sell for chief financial officers. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Cost of Caution: Why CFOs Put Growth Plans on Hold,” the latest installment of the 2026 Certainty Project, found in September that middle-market CFOs set a higher bar for investing than retreating.
More than half said they need a high level of certainty before committing to expansion, yet 91% said only a small or moderate decline in certainty could push their companies into a defensive posture.
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