The future is agentic, this is no longer a prediction but a reality that every major and minor system is adapting to.
The business world is expected to see major impacts because of artificial intelligence. Agentic payments, which are payments initiated, optimized, and executed by AI agents acting on behalf of customers or businesses under predefined rules, will be amongst some of the leading disruptors of businesses.
A leading change that is expected by most is that AI agents will take over online transactions, especially payments for goods and services.
Naturally, this leads to higher flow of money as AI agents eliminate several frictions associated with payments. But there's a question that remains unanswered and in some cases, not even asked and that question is: how will agentic payments impact business income?
Knowing your audience
What happens when businesses are no longer selling directly to humans but agents? How do you "know your audience" when that audience is an AI agent?
This is something a lot of people haven't truly considered.
People look at agentic payments and think "payments automation" whilst in reality, it's more than that.
Automation has existed for years, even in payments. This is nothing new. But what AI agents offer is well beyond automation.
We are moving into an era where businesses are selling to agents. This is the first line of contact and also happens to be the last.
This means that every product or service that gets advertised hereon, is being advertised to AI agents.
They will see the ads, they will analyze the products and services, they will handle the payments.
Everything that businesses have learned about people and optimized messaging and all else accordingly, simply collapses.
Agents possess adaptive behavior, this will be reflected in payments. Every business will be fighting to be the most optimized seller.
In the same way that businesses have to sell a dream to humans, they will need to find the edge that works best for agents.
Most of the world is currently lost in the conclusion that AI agents will only disrupt the payment business, but it will also force every other business to make major changes to its operations or risk losing significant income to competitors that do.
I think it will be interesting to monitor how the business world adjusts to agentic payments. Marketing, pricing, consumer incentives, to name a few, will see major changes over the next couple decades.
Will the agents respond to marketing messages in the same way as humans would? Will most humans give their agents flexibility in this area or stick strongly to rules that leaves the human elements central to their operations?
Personally, I believe that agents will be given lots of flexibilities, because that's the convenient choice. Most people won't love the idea of sitting to set lengthy defined rules, plus the concept of flexibilities will be more appealing as it would naturally suggest "higher-intelligence-based" decision making for agentic operations.
This inevitability is what will necessitate a major change across all businesses. With agentic payments comes a change of the audiences businesses are selling to, and the income impacts will depend greatly on which entities can adapt perfectly and which can't.