The Rise of Agentic Payments: When AI Starts Paying the Bills

AI agents are coming for payments — and businesses are not prepared. The payments infrastructure we rely on today is excellent at moving money efficiently and securely between people and businesses. But it wasn’t built for a future in which AI agents initiate payments on our behalf. As agentic payments gain traction, there is growing demand to rebuild core infrastructure and explore new applications — across both B2B and consumer payments — that are optimised for autonomy, security, and regulatory alignment.

While most media coverage focuses on the consumer side — from Google’s AI Shopping Mode to Amazon’s Buy It For Me and Perplexity’s Shopping tool — we’re especially excited about what’s happening under the hood: the infrastructure that will power agentic payments at scale and its B2B applications to make businesses more efficient.

Building the Rails: Infrastructure Market Segmentation

To support safe, seamless, and scalable agent-driven transactions, new infrastructure is emerging across several key categories:

• Autonomous transaction initiation:

This includes companies building agents that independently initiate and execute payments — whether recurring, scheduled, or triggered by specific conditions (e.g. a price drop below a user-defined threshold).

• Virtual and Tokenized Payments:

Players like Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are actively innovating in this space (explored in more detail below). They are developing tools that enable agents to autonomously generate virtual cards with user-defined budgets — cards the agents can then use to complete transactions.

• Wallet and payment management:

Coinbase’s x402 represents the first generation of agent-enabled wallets. The envisioned future sees agents buying, selling, or earning income online using stablecoin wallets. This would nearly eliminate traditional checkout flows, enabling agents to make decisions and transfer funds autonomously and instantly. While innovation in this space is rapid, fraud remains a serious concern, and companies must move cautiously until clear regulations and safeguards are in place.

• Compliance and risk management:

A growing number of startups are addressing agent-specific challenges such as identity verification, “Know Your Agent” (KYA), “Human Not Present” transactions, automated compliance, and secure storage and transmission of payments data. Traditionally, security frameworks have focused on keeping bots out — now, with agentic payments, systems must recognise and admit trusted agents while excluding malicious ones. Fraud risk is high, but so is the opportunity for companies that can deliver robust compliance and risk solutions.

Hot off the Presses: Agentic Payments’ Biggest Releases

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In the past few weeks, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Coinbase, and others have unveiled major updates to their agentic payments strategies — signalling that intelligent, autonomous transaction infrastructure is no longer theoretical.

• Stripe released its Agent Toolkit, which enables developers to integrate payments flow into their AI agents, allowing agents to search for and autonomously pay for transactions. They do this by issuing single-use virtual cards with a budget set by the user.
• Visa set up Intelligent Commerce, tokenising their cards so an agent can safely pay on a user’s behalf, leveraging the user’s previous purchase data to inform the agent’s purchasing decisions, and establishing infrastructure for identity verification and safe transactions.
• Mastercard published Agent Pay, which, similarly to Visa, tokenizes cards for business use cases, partnering first with Microsoft to scale their service.
• PayPal introduced the PayPal Agent Toolkit, which enables agents to use much of PayPal’s functionality, including payments, invoices, disputes, shipment tracking, catalogues, subscriptions, and reporting. They highlight use cases in subscription management and shipment tracking, where agents will curate your subscription plans and handle payment, make purchases for you and track shipping.
• Coinbase launched x402, a payment protocol that enables stablecoin payments via agents. Starting with payments only for APIs, services, and software, Coinbase offers authentication, settlement, and payment services. They call this the first internet-native way to send and receive payments.

Use Cases in B2B

With this infrastructure, we’re seeing a variety of emerging agentic use cases in B2B payment flows, and we’re looking forward to seeing this segment evolve.

One natural use case is Accounts Payable (AP). The genesis of AI agents saw many companies step in to automate AP — processing invoices, detecting fraud, and improving analytics. A process that was once done by a full team of people is now increasingly done by agents- with 75% of AP work in $10bn+ companies being handled by AI. Eventually, these agents will autonomously check invoices received from merchants, digest payment terms, and send payments without human intervention.

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While B2B applications of agentic payments are still nascent, there is already noticeable traction in the consumer space.

Existing Traction in Consumer: Bringing Payments into Agentic Commerce

During this holiday season, e-commerce traffic generated by AI-powered chatbots was up by 1,300% compared to the previous year. Adobe surveyed people about their experiences, and 92% said the chatbots enhanced their experience, and they would use them again. Consumer brands have noticed this and begun implementing agents into their sites- Nvidia shares that 9 out of 10 retailers are already using AI, 40% of which is used for digital shopping assistants or copilots. As agents increasingly handle search, selection, and decision-making, agentic payments become the natural next step.

Calling All Founders Building In Agentic Payments

At Illuminate, we bring a deep strategic network — including 11 leading financial institutions and infrastructure players who are investors in our firm. We specialise in helping founders navigate go-to-market and partnership strategies in financial services.

We’re excited to support entrepreneurs building the next generation of B2B agentic payments and infrastructure. If you’re building in this space, exploring ideas, or simply curious about the future of agentic payments, we’d love to hear from you.

Reach out to me at lnassim@illuminatefinancial.com