Mercury lets a connected AI tool request a vendor payment that someone approves in Mercury

The task

Paying suppliers is a routine part of running a small business: an invoice arrives, someone looks up the recipient, checks the amount and the account to pay from, and sets up the transfer. Owners who already ask an AI assistant about their spending or their balance would like to prepare those payments from the same conversation instead of switching to the banking dashboard for each one. The obvious risk is that a tool with write access to a business account could send money by mistake or on the strength of a bad instruction. Mercury's documentation is written for teams that want the convenience of preparing payments with an AI tool while keeping the actual release of money with a person.

What they did

According to the documentation, the account holder connects an AI tool to Mercury through a sign-in and consent screen, with ready connectors listed for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor and manual setup for other clients. Each write action needs its own permission, and older read-only connections have to be authorized again before they gain any of them. Once connected, the AI tool can answer questions about balances, transactions, statements and recipients. For payments, the user asks it in plain language to request a payment to a recipient that already exists in Mercury, from a named account. The tool creates a payment request, and a similar action creates a transfer request between the company's own accounts. The person then opens Mercury, finds the request in the list of items that need approval, and checks the recipient, the amount, the payment method and the timing before approving it. The documentation also suggests asking the AI tool to list open requests before creating a new one after an unclear result, so the same payment is not requested twice.

Where the approval sits

Payment and transfer requests wait in Mercury until an eligible approver accepts them there. The documentation states that the AI tool cannot approve a request or move money on its own, that a confirmation in the chat is not an approval, and that a created request does not mean a sent payment. The company's existing approval rules still apply, and where those rules would let a payment through without review, the person who made the request still has to approve it in Mercury. Changes to expense categories and transaction notes are different: they apply at once, with no approval step.

Worth knowing

The source is Mercury's own documentation, so it describes the intended behaviour and reports no results from any business. The connector is marked as a beta, and Mercury advises checking answers against the account before any important decision. The AI tool cannot add new recipients, so a payment to a new supplier still starts in Mercury. Mercury also warns that read access exposes balances, transaction history and recipient details to the AI tool, and that instructions hidden in other content could push an agent to share data or change categories and notes, which take effect without review.

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