Agentic Payments

Agentic payments are the capability of an autonomous AI agent to initiate, authorize, and complete a payment on a user's behalf. Unlike conventional online checkout, where a person confirms every step, the agent runs the transaction itself: it selects the product, checks price and terms, and releases payment within limits the user has set in advance. Making this safe depends on several building blocks — a verifiable agent identity, fine-grained approval and spending limits, and an auditable record of every transaction. The shift is being driven by moves such as the Visa and OpenAI payment integration, which lets ChatGPT agents pay merchants directly. For businesses, this changes who sits at the customer interface: purchases are now triggered not only by people but by the agents acting for them. Agentic payments are therefore the execution layer of agentic commerce — the concrete ability to pay that builds on standardized protocols and machine-readable product data, and carries the whole purchase through to completion without manual intervention.