Agentic payments
Payments initiated and completed by software agents rather than people, priced per call and settled without a human at the keyboard.
Agentic payments are payments where the buyer is a program. An agent decides it needs a dataset, a model call, or another agent's output, agrees a price, pays, and continues — inside one task, with no person approving each transaction.
This breaks most of the assumptions payment systems are built on. There is no card on file because there was no signup. There is no monthly invoice because the relationship may last one request. Amounts are often fractions of a cent, and the counterparty may be a service the agent has never called before.
Two things have to hold for it to work at all: settlement fast and cheap enough to happen per request, and some way for the payer to recover if what it bought never arrives. The first is what protocols like x402 provide. The second is not automatic, and is where escrow and decision logging come in.