The AI agent economy is taking off. Its next phase will be massively expanded by payments between agents and between agents and humans.
As AI agents grow in capabilities, individuals are delegating tasks to single agents that can perform tasks on their behalf such as research, curation, scheduling, travel planning, or email drafting.
Companies are “employing” agents to perform a wide range of functions, including customer service, content creation, sales outreach, invoice tracking, and internal communications.
And multi-agent systems are bringing together a variety of specialized AI agents to collaborate for better outcomes in more complex situations.
In simple configurations these agents have clearly defined tasks and responsibilities. However a critical component of the definition of an agent is that it has some degree of autonomy. As the systems we build become more complex, we will need to give more responsibility to our agents.
One of the most important thresholds is giving agents the ability and permission to make payments.
In Humans + AI multi-agent systems, agents could make payments to humans for particular tasks.
In 2014 I wrote about the potential of machine-to-machine payments, enabling autonomous agents or devices to make payments between themselves.
Scenarios included autonomous cars making payments to each other to facilitate paths, or systems negotiating bandwidth pricing with each other depending on demand.
A number of companies are now already enabling this key infrastructure for a massive explosion in the complexity of the economy.
Skyfire describes itself as “the financial stack for the AI economy”, enabling agents to discover and pay for the services they need to fulfil their tasks, applying specific business rules.
Payman, with a tagline of “AI that pays humans”, recognizes that humans will still play important non-substitutable roles, and enables agent systems to pay humans to do work to achieve its objectives.
This is just the very beginning. As I wrote in 2014, “an entirely new layer of the economy could open up” with agent to agent payments. The number of economic entities is likely dramatically multiply.
I’ll explore some of the potential implications in other posts.
