Agentic Payments
Payments initiated and completed by autonomous software acting on a user's behalf, without a human manually entering payment details for each transaction.
Agentic payments are transactions initiated and completed by autonomous software acting on a user's behalf — the software decides to make a purchase or payment and executes it directly, without a human manually entering payment details or approving each individual transaction.
In crypto specifically, agentic payments are commonly built using an AI agent wallet (see Kaavon's "AI Agent Wallet" glossary definition) with pre-configured spending limits; this is an actively emerging area, and claims about its current scale or adoption should be treated with real caution, since much of the available information comes from vendors marketing this exact capability.
Examples
- An agentic payment might involve an AI agent autonomously paying for an API service it needs, within spending limits its operator configured in advance.
- Agentic payments remove the need for a human to manually approve each individual transaction, relying instead on pre-configured limits and permissions.