The New Frontier for Payments

Dateline: Auckland, 2nd April 2025.With AI systems becoming increasingly agentic (ie, capable of carrying out actions toward goals over extended periods of time, without humans being in the loop or pre-specifying their actions) and business-to-robot-to-consumer (B2R2C) commerce about to explode, it is a natural evolution for AIs to become economic actors in their own right and to exchange value in return for services. Bot-to-bot payments are building out a new frontier that will need new rails.Subscribe nowChange is OutsideAs McKinsey have said, chatbots are just the beginning of the evolution from the current knowledge-based, generative AI-based tools—such as chatbots that answer questions and generate content—to agents that use models to execute complex, multistep workflows across a digital world, “moving from talking to doing”. These software robots powered by agentic AIs — actually, for simplicity, let’s go back to calling them bots — will be just like human Internet users but much faster and much smarter.As I have said, the big change in financial services will come when customers have bots, not when financial institutions have bots. It is not at all clear to me that banks, retailers, airlines and other have taken on board what this will mean for their medium-term strategies, and all of them will have to.Take the example of airlines, one familiar to most readers. Every time I try to use my frequent flier miles to go somewhere interesting, there are no seats available. In order to get seats that are actually useful, I have to log…The New Frontier for Payments