Sector leaders and chief financial officers don’t have time to wait around for grand visions to materialize. Instead, their time is spent focusing on narrower, more practical problems, recognizing that those with a real-world business impact are what matter most over the long run.
The time it takes for money to move from invoice to bank account is as practical a problem as these leaders are likely to face. The problem is simple to describe and stubbornly hard to solve. Between the moment a sale is made and the moment cash actually lands in the bank, money slows down. Invoices get stuck. Payments arrive late or without remittance data. Reconciliations drag on. Forecasts drift further from reality. Each delay turns booked revenue into idle capital.
That interval, long treated as an operational inconvenience rather than a strategic variable, became a defining line in 2025 between companies that could act decisively and those that remained constrained by their own processes.
Read also: Cash Forecasting Frequency Is Becoming a New Corporate Fault Line
How AI Is Changing the Economics of Payments First Mile
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Time to Cash™: A New Measure of Business Resilience,” a collaboration with Bottomline and FIS, segmented the 375 U.S. CFOs surveyed into three personas: Strategic Movers, Stable Operators and Liquidity Constrained.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
What distinguished Strategic Movers from the pack was not simply that they automated more processes, but that they approached receivables as infrastructure rather than administration. Strategic Movers understood that the first mile of cash was a factor determinative of performance.
They mapped the end-to-end journey of cash, from the moment an invoice was issued to the instant funds were reconciled and visible. Where friction appeared, they intervened deliberately, redesigning workflows that had gone unchanged for years.
Per the report, 94% of Strategic Movers cited cash flow cycle improvement as important to their financial leadership strategy for the next 12 months. CFOs need to know not only how much cash they have, but when it will arrive, and with what degree of certainty.
Artificial intelligence accelerated this shift by changing how decisions were made. Machine learning models flagged invoices likely to be disputed before they were sent. Predictive tools modeled customer payment behavior, allowing teams to anticipate delays rather than react to them. Reconciliation engines matched payments to invoices even when data was incomplete, reducing the lag between receipt and visibility.
Enterprises have automated, on average, 55% of their accounts receivable processes per the Time to Cash™ study. However, the difference between Strategic Movers and Liquidity Constrained companies is striking. Strategic Movers have 27% more AR automation than Liquidity Constrained firms.
Strategic Movers also prioritized near-real-time posting and reconciliation, reducing the lag between payment receipt and cash visibility. They integrated invoicing, payments and remittance data into unified workflows rather than siloed systems. Critically, they embedded intelligence into these workflows, allowing systems to flag anomalies, predict delays and recommend interventions.
The report found that 88% of Strategic Movers expect major improvements to their Time to Cash™ cycles within a year through advanced AI adoption, and firms using advanced AI tools are twice as likely to be Strategic Movers.
See also: Why CFOs Who Prioritize Cash Flow Improvements Start With Receivables Innovation
Forecasting Matures From Rearview Mirror to Radar
As 2026 approaches, the implications of 2025’s first-mile focus are becoming clear. Cash velocity is no longer a secondary metric. It is emerging as one of the clearest indicators of enterprise resilience, particularly as volatility in interest rates, supply chains and customer demand means that timing mattered as much as totals.
“CFOs are in the business of control,” Jeff Feuerstein, senior vice president of Paymode Product Management and Market Strategy for Bottomline, told PYMNTS this month, adding that the ability for technology to “take care of decisions rather than just provide insights” represents a change in how finance leaders operate.
The next frontier may lie in deeper intelligence and autonomy. Agentic AI, capable of orchestrating end-to-end cash decisions with minimal human intervention, could promise further gains. But the foundation remains the same: clean data, integrated workflows and disciplined execution at the point where cash enters the system.
However, trust hurdles will still need to be overcome, as underscored by data in the September edition of The CAIO Report from PYMNTS Intelligence, “How Agentic AI Went From Zero to CFO Test Runs in 90 Days.” The report found that none of the CFOs surveyed were willing to grant full, unfettered access to internal data and action permissions to agentic AI systems, and only 8.3% would allow moderate access.
For all PYMNTS B2B and AI coverage, subscribe to the daily B2B and AI Newsletters.
