Do we still need payment terms?
Net 30 is a fossil. And we are all still building around it.
For over 2,000 years, payment terms have been calibrated to how fast information and goods could move. Roman buyers got about a month. Medieval merchants settled at the next trade fair. When commerce went transatlantic, terms stretched to six months because that is how long ships took.
Every era updated payment terms when the world got faster. Then somewhere around the late 1800s, American wholesalers landed on "Net 30" and we just stopped. That seems ridiculous now that the courier is gone and information is instant. A transaction that used to take weeks to confirm now takes milliseconds, yet finance teams still run five-year framework contracts that lock in terms like it is 1895.
In an agentic world, where both sides of a transaction have full context, static terms are useless. The terms themselves do not go away — there are still reasons money moves on a delay: cash position, relationship history, early-pay economics. But the deterministic part is unnecessary now.
Agents do not need a PDF to know what is owed. They do not need 30 days to review and approve. They can negotiate timing dynamically based on what actually makes sense in that moment for both sides.