We’re at the beginning of a profound shift in how businesses operate. AI is moving from the edges of experimentation into the core of mission-critical systems, reshaping how decisions are made, work is executed, and value is created.
For payment leaders, this opportunity here isn’t just about doing things faster or cheaper. It’s about unlocking possibilities that were previously out of reach.
In most companies, just one or two people are responsible for the entire payment flow.
Every day, they’re tracking down failed transactions, fighting fraud, negotiating with processors, and trying to squeeze another 0.2% out of authorization rates, all while managing an endless backlog of operational tasks just to keep things running.
We asked ourselves: what if that could change? What if Primer’s data and expertise could be amplified by AI, giving every payments team the scale, precision, and intelligence of a hundred teammates?
That’s why we’ve built the world’s first AI Companion for payments, an intelligent teammate that deeply understands your business, and acts with you to push its potential further.
How Primer AI Companion works
Our Companion isn’t a generalist AI, it’s a payments expert that’s constantly monitoring your payments to uncover anomalies, inefficiencies, and untapped opportunities. It offers recommendations aligned with your goals and constraints. And when you’re ready, it turns ideas into action, with your approval and full visibility every step of the way.
You can interact with the AI Companion in two ways:
- Contextual recommendations: The Companion surfaces insights and next steps directly within the part of the Primer platform you’re already using. It highlights opportunities or risks, explains its reasoning, and suggests experiments to validate impact.
- Conversational interface: Ask questions, explore performance trends, or request tailored recommendations without needing a data analyst. It’s payment intelligence, instantly accessible in natural language.
Powered by data, guided by expertise
The AI Companion is the next chapter of the platform we’ve been building from day one.
Our mission has always been simple: to help merchants get the most out of their payments and we’re uniquely positioned to do it.
Every year, billions of dollars in transactions flow through Primer, spanning geographies, industries, processors, card networks, issuers, and payment methods. That scope gives our AI an unmatched foundation: the depth to understand an individual merchant’s strategy, and the breadth to benchmark it against global performance.
This combination allows you to instantly detect anomalies, surface proven strategies, and recommend actions with confidence. It’s a perspective no single merchant or payment provider could ever have on their own, and one that makes a Primer payment worth more than any other.
But data alone isn’t what makes the Companion powerful. Its strength also comes from our years of experience working side by side with merchants, solving their toughest operational and strategic challenges. We know how payment teams work, what slows them down, and what drives results.
That experience is what empowered us to build something more than a generic AI tool. Companion understands the language, logic, and nuances of a merchant’s payment ecosystem, so it doesn’t just respond, it reasons.
In other words: it thinks and acts like a payment expert.
Built for trust and transparency
When you bring AI into payments, trust and security matter more than anything. At Primer we take privacy and data security extremely seriously, and the Companion has been built from the ground up with your business’s safety in mind.
- It can’t make changes without your permission.
- It is not a black box: you can always see what it did, and the reasons behind its recommendations.
- And your data is yours alone. It’s never shared, never pooled, never exposed.
What comes next?
We’re incredibly bullish about what AI will unlock for payment leaders. The introduction of the Primer AI Companion marks a step change for how payment teams operate. And it’s only the beginning.
We’re bringing Companion to every part of the Primer platform, expanding beyond payments to support new use cases like managing FX through Global Accounts, streamlining Reconciliation, and giving Partners deeper intelligence into how their merchant base performs.
Over time, the Companion will become an indispensable part of every team using Primer, helping everybody using our platform work smarter, focus on higher-impact priorities, and play a more strategic role in their business.
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