Just posted to my Forbes column about one of the biggest missing pieces in the AI agent economy: payments.
For years, AI agents could research, schedule, analyze and automate workflows, but they couldn’t really buy anything on their own in a secure and trusted way. That’s starting to change. San Francisco startup InFlow just launched what it calls agent-native commerce infrastructure built on top of Visa Intelligent Commerce, effectively giving AI agents wallets with built-in rules and policies about what they can and cannot spend money on.
The deeper issue here isn’t just payments. It’s trust. Human beings have always acted as the policy layer in commerce: we decide what to buy, when to buy it and how much to spend. Once you remove the human from the loop, that policy layer disappears unless you rebuild it intentionally. That’s the problem InFlow is trying to solve, and it may turn out to be one of the foundational challenges of the entire agentic economy.
“One way to think about it,” founder Jim Nguyen told me previously, “is that AI agents are getting smarter every day, but they still can’t activate or pay for services on their own.”
What makes this especially interesting is that Visa is involved. This isn’t some experimental crypto sandbox. By using Visa’s global payments infrastructure, tokenization and merchant network, agentic transactions start looking a lot more like mainstream commerce and a lot less like science fiction.