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. One helps me research the humanoid robot ecosystem; another manages my daily email and weekly calendar. Until now, however, agents had a hard time paying 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 agent-native commerce infrastructure, built on top of Visa Intelligent Commerce. The combination is meaningful because it pairs two things the agentic economy has been missing in the same place: secure, network-grade 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 launched late last year to enable agentic payments. At the time, founder and former PayPal 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 “the lack of an AI-native payment system designed to remove friction from agentic commerce.” His goal was to launch PayPal, essentially, for agents.
Now it appears he’s actually done that.
InFlow positions itself as B2AI infrastructure: business-to-AI. In other words, the customer it’s built for isn’t a human but an agent. The platform handles identity, onboarding, multi-currency wallet functionality and what InFlow calls a policy-governed payments engine. Visa Intelligent Commerce supplies the payment credentials, tokenization, authentication and merchant acceptance through Visa’s global network.
“AI agents are a new buyer category, and businesses need a trusted way to support them,” Visa VP Tanner Riche said in a statement. “Visa Intelligent Commerce helps enable secure, trusted credentials for agent-initiated transactions. Together with InFlow, we’re helping build infrastructure that connects developers, buyers and sellers into the B2AI economy.”
This might sound so cutting edge that is risks being bleeding edge, but this is a large emerging market. According to Visa’s own Business-to-AI report, 71% of businesses say they’re willing to optimize products, offers, and experiences specifically for AI agents and 77% are already using or piloting AI in their operations.
That’s a lot of companies preparing to sell to a customer that, until very recently, couldn’t pay for anything. Never mind not existing, period.
Of course, the deeper question this launch surfaces isn’t whether agents can transact … it’s how they’re supposed to make decisions about transacting. And whether we trust our AI agents to spend our money.
Today, says Nguyen, the human is the policy.
When we chatted late last week, he walked me through what he sees as a structural gap in existing payment infrastructure. Today’s payment systems, he argued, are essentially fused together with us: the decision layer (what to buy, how much to spend, under what conditions) and the entry layer (typing card numbers and clicking submit) collapse into a single human action.
That’s pretty obvious, right: we decide what to buy, how much to spend, where to spend. But because the human is the policy, if you pull the human out of the loop, the policy goes with them.
And that becomes the missing layer in agentic commerce.
It’s the answer InFlow gives to the inevitable investor question — why can’t Stripe do this — and it’s the part of the agentic commerce story that most existing wallets and processors haven’t fully addressed. A wallet that can be drained by anything holding the right credentials is a different product from a wallet that knows what it’s allowed to spend on, with whom and under what limits.
(If you’re not sure about that, remember that X’s Grok just lost $200,000 in crypto when a user sent it some Morse code.)
So policies and protections are essential for agentic commerce. 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 existing infrastructure. But the gap Nguyen is pointing at — that policy and payment have always been separate concerns held together by a human, and that decoupling requires more than a UI change — is real, and it’s the kind of structural problem that can block innovation if not handled correctly.
Right now this is pretty B2B focused. It’s not you or me asking an agent to buy a pair of Air Jordan’s in size 10 if they come available at $200.
InFlow and Visa are aiming at B2B cloud infrastructure: the compute, inference, data, storage and capability layers that agents themselves consume to do their work. My agents have spent upwards of $2,000 in tokens over the last three months, but I’ve had to personally authorize all of those payments. The shoes-and-airline-tickets version of consumer agentic commerce is a longer 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 isn’t just a co-marketing badge. It’s an additional trust layer. Tokenization, authentication, and merchant acceptance across Visa’s network mean that an agent transacting through InFlow isn’t operating in a crypto fantasy: it’s transacting with credentials that any merchant on Visa’s global network can recognize and accept.
That’s important.
The big question, however, is whether the big digital payment players will adopt similar technology quickly enough to compete.
