AI agents can now pay for services, thanks to new technology from Visa and InFlow.
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AI agents are doing more and more work every day. Someone help me research the humanoid robot ecosystem. another manages my daily email and weekly calendar. Until now, however, agents have struggled to pay for services, even if I wanted to authorize them to do so. This week, that changed. San Francisco-based InFlow is launching what it calls a native agent commerce infrastructure built on top of Visa Intelligent Commerce. The combination is important because it combines two things that have been missing from the agent economy in the same space: secure, network-level payment credentials that an agent can actually use, and a policy engine that decides what an agent is allowed to do with them.
In other words: the AI agent gets a wallet, and the wallet comes with rules.
InFlow was launched late last year to enable payments through agents. At the time, PayPal founder and former executive Jim Nguyen told me that “AI agents are getting smarter every day, but they still can’t activate or pay for services on their own.”
The problem: not a lack of intelligence, but “a lack of a native AI payment system designed to take friction out of the merchant agency.” His goal was to start PayPal, essentially, for agents.
Now it looks like he really did.
InFlow is positioned as a B2AI: business-to-AI infrastructure. In other words, the client it is built for is not a human but an agent. The platform handles identity, onboarding, multi-currency wallet functionality and what InFlow calls a policy-governed payment engine. Visa Intelligent Commerce provides payment credentials, tokenization, authentication and merchant acceptance through Visa’s global network.
“AI agents are a new class of buyer, and businesses need a reliable way to support them,” Visa vice president Tanner Riche said in a statement. “Visa Intelligent Commerce helps enable secure, trusted credentials for agent-initiated transactions. Together with InFlow, we’re helping to build infrastructure that connects developers, buyers and sellers in the B2AI economy.”
This may sound so cutting edge that it risks becoming cutting edge, but this is a big emerging market. According to Visa Business-to-AI reportt, 71% of businesses say they are willing to optimize products, offerings and experiences specifically for AI agents, and 77% are already using or piloting AI in their operations.
That’s a lot of companies getting ready to sell to a customer who, until very recently, couldn’t pay for anything. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t exist, period.
Of course, the deeper question that surfaces in this launch isn’t whether agents can trade… it’s how they’re supposed to make decisions about trading. And if we trust our AI agents to spend our money.
Today, says Nguyen, man is politics.
When we chatted late last week, he walked me through what he sees as a structural gap in the existing payments infrastructure. Today’s payment systems, he argued, are essentially merged with us: the decision level (what to buy, how much to spend, under what circumstances) and the entry level (keying in card numbers and clicking submit) all coincide into a single human action.
This is pretty obvious, right: we decide what to buy, how much to spend, where to spend. But because man is politics, if you take man out of the circle, politics goes with him.
And this becomes the missing layer in the trade agency.
It’s InFlow’s answer to the inevitable investor question — why can’t Stripe do this — and it’s the part of the merchant agency story that most existing wallets and processors haven’t fully addressed. A wallet that can be drained by anything with the right credentials is a different product than a wallet that knows what it’s allowed to spend on, with whom, and under what limits.
(If you’re not sure about this, remember that X is Grock lost $200,000 in crypto when a user sent him some Morse code.)
Therefore, policies and protections are necessary for representative trade. And of course Stripe and other major payment players are probably not standing still on this. There’s no reason they couldn’t build a policy layer on top of the existing infrastructure. But the loophole Nguyen points to—that policy and payment have always been separate concerns held by a human, and that decoupling requires more than a user interface change—is real, and it’s the kind of structural problem that can stifle innovation if not properly addressed.
At the moment this is quite B2B focused. You or I are not asking an agent to buy a pair of Air Jordan’s in size 10 if they are available at $200.
InFlow and Visa are targeting B2B cloud infrastructure: the layers of compute, inference, data, storage and capabilities that agents themselves consume to do their jobs. My agents have spent over $2,000 in chips in the last three months, but I had to personally authorize all of those payments. The shoes and airline ticketing of the consumer agent trade is a bigger arc (but it’s coming too).
It’s telling that Visa is the partner here, and not just some crypto company or stablecoin platform.
Visa Intelligent Commerce is not just a co-marketing brand. It’s an extra level of trust. Authentication, authentication and merchant acceptance across Visa’s network means that an agent transacting through InFlow isn’t operating in a cryptographic fantasy: it transacts with credentials that any merchant in Visa’s global network can recognize and accept.
This is important.
The big question, however, is whether the big digital payments players will adopt similar technology quickly enough to compete.
