  The axion-like particle (ALP) may induce flavor-changing neutral currents
(FCNCs) when their Peccei-Quinn charges are not generation universal. The
search for flavor-violating ALP couplings with a bottom quark so far focused on
FCNC processes of $B$ mesons at low energies. The recent measurements of $B\to
K +X$ rare decays place stringent bounds on the quark flavor violations of a
light ALP in different decay modes. In this work we propose a novel direct
search for bottom flavor-violating interaction of a heavy ALP at the LHC and
its upgrades, namely QCD production of an ALP associated with one $b$ jet and
one light jet $p~p\to b~j~a$. We consider the decay of the ALP to photons,
muons and invisible ALP decays. The Boosted Decision Tree (BDT) algorithm is
used to analyze the events and we train the BDT classifier by feeding in the
kinematic observables of signal and backgrounds. Finally, we show the
complementarity between the search prospects of hadron colliders and the
low-energy $B$ meson constraints from $B$ meson mixing and $B$ meson decays to
a light ALP.
