Agent-ready payments

// the question

Finance teams already ask AI agents to summarize invoices and draft vendor emails. The moment they need to act on money, they switch tabs and do it by hand. We wanted to know what it takes for an agent to work inside accounts payable directly, without handing it the keys.

// what we built

A set of tools that an AI agent can connect to on behalf of a Cleo business. The agent can read bills, look up vendors and bank accounts, and draft new bills for a person to review. It acts only for the business that connected it, and only with the permissions that business gave its key.

• Connects through the Model Context Protocol, the open standard most agents now support
• Scoped per business, with keys you create and revoke from your settings
• Bills an agent creates are always drafts; moving money needs a separate payment permission the business grants on purpose

// what we learned

Doing the work through the tools was the easy part. Every model we tested read bills and entered them correctly almost every time: 95 to 100% on reading and writing.

Judgment is where they differed. The most common miss was entering a bill that already existed, and the smallest model sometimes acted on a request it should have questioned. Those misses are what we build safeguards against next.

// what's next

Access is open to a small group of partners. We rerun these evals as the tools change, and widen what agents can do one careful step at a time.