The next customer to initiate a payment may not be a person. AI agents are beginning to shop, procure, pay invoices and transact with other machines on behalf of consumers and businesses. Today’s payment systems were built around human intent, authentication and disputes, and that assumption is starting to fail.

This panel discussion will examine the leaders that are building the rules of agentic commerce, looking at how agents are authenticated and authorized, how spending mandates and limits are set and enforced, and who bears liability when an agent makes a mistake or is manipulated. 

Panelists will also discuss how disputes and chargebacks work without a human at the point of sale, and which agent payment protocols are emerging across card, real-time and stablecoin rails. Looking ahead, they will consider what institutions must have in place before agent-initiated payments reach scale, and who will own the trust relationship between customers, agents and the payment system. The conversation will also tackle:

• How do you verify that an agent is acting within its mandate, and prove it after the fact
• When an agent pays wrongly, who is liable: the customer, the agent provider, the merchant or the bank?
• Which rails and protocols are best suited to machine-to-machine payments at scale?