A lot of focus on agentic payments metrics recently.
Classic case of narrative / excitement overshooting adoption. But there’s progress happening if you know where to look.
There are 4 pieces to solve for adoption:
Users
Harness
Model
API
Users
“Who” is using the agent. Today, all agents tie back to a person, for now. So if agents are going to spend money, their person needs money. Most people using agents today have a bank account and debit / credit card. A smaller subset have a funded crypto wallet.
The main issue is that most people don’t have their money connected to their agents. Early adopters can do this today: give OpenClaw plaintext card info, install the MPP skill, etc. But it requires awareness and sophistication. It’s not the default, which limits adoption. Reasonable to assume this changes.
Harness
“How” you use the agent. Harness is sometimes separate from model, eg OpenClaw using Claude or Cursor using DeepSeek. But for most people, the harness is built by the model company.
If most consumers use the default option, a harness eventually built into an operating system, eg iOS, will have a significant impact on what payment method gets connected to an agent.
Model
“What” agent you are using. You can see where payments adoption is today by asking your favorite agent to “register me a domain name.” The default payment tool use from model companies, especially vertically integrated experiences, will have a huge influence on defaults.
APIs
“Where” the agent spends money. This is the supply side of the marketplace, and where most progress is happening.
It helps that Stripe supports nearly all agentic payments protocols, including different ones for e-commerce vs APIs, and has distribution to 5 million businesses, including virtually all leading AI companies.
But even if a business turns on agentic payments for their API, you still have to solve users / harness / model adoption.
Also, most services today are built around accounts and periodic billing. Migrating to usage-based billing will take time, both for incumbents and new AI-native services.
Classic case of narrative / excitement overshooting adoption. But there’s progress happening if you know where to look.
There are 4 pieces to solve for adoption:
Users
Harness
Model
API
Users
“Who” is using the agent. Today, all agents tie back to a person, for now. So if agents are going to spend money, their person needs money. Most people using agents today have a bank account and debit / credit card. A smaller subset have a funded crypto wallet.
The main issue is that most people don’t have their money connected to their agents. Early adopters can do this today: give OpenClaw plaintext card info, install the MPP skill, etc. But it requires awareness and sophistication. It’s not the default, which limits adoption. Reasonable to assume this changes.
Harness
“How” you use the agent. Harness is sometimes separate from model, eg OpenClaw using Claude or Cursor using DeepSeek. But for most people, the harness is built by the model company.
If most consumers use the default option, a harness eventually built into an operating system, eg iOS, will have a significant impact on what payment method gets connected to an agent.
Model
“What” agent you are using. You can see where payments adoption is today by asking your favorite agent to “register me a domain name.” The default payment tool use from model companies, especially vertically integrated experiences, will have a huge influence on defaults.
APIs
“Where” the agent spends money. This is the supply side of the marketplace, and where most progress is happening.
It helps that Stripe supports nearly all agentic payments protocols, including different ones for e-commerce vs APIs, and has distribution to 5 million businesses, including virtually all leading AI companies.
But even if a business turns on agentic payments for their API, you still have to solve users / harness / model adoption.
Also, most services today are built around accounts and periodic billing. Migrating to usage-based billing will take time, both for incumbents and new AI-native services.
The industry doesn’t help itself since there are plenty of headline metrics bullposted that are uninteresting at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.
(No one outside of crypto cares about an agentic payment that launches a memecoin. So if your number includes that people will stop paying attention.)
(No one outside of crypto cares about an agentic payment that launches a memecoin. So if your number includes that people will stop paying attention.)
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