a16z Crypto: How to do business in the AI Agent economy?

Article Author: a16z crypto, SamBroner

Article Compiled by: Block unicorn

Introduction

As a tourist strolling through a market, you would see a bustling scene: people jostling, intently staring at products, comparing various items, tasting, bargaining with each vendor, and exchanging currency. It seems like a series of one-off transactions—each interaction is a small negotiation, with trust maintained through cash or value exchanged via credit cards.

But this is not how most transactions in the market operate. Upon closer observation: most people are locals, purposefully heading to their favorite vendors. Restaurant owners visit their friends, butchers, fishmongers, and farmers. Tailors go to repairmen, weavers, and craftsmen. They all use credit.

When we discuss how smart agents will pay, we often unconsciously think from a tourist's perspective.

But smart agents will behave more like locals. The difference between smart agents and humans lies in their characteristics—unlimited replication, flexible resource allocation, zero startup costs—which means that a few smart agents can dominate niche markets. Even as the creation of smart agents becomes easier, relationships, partnerships, and trust still contribute to building successful user experiences. Dominant smart agents do not need tourist payment channels; they need vendor relationships, working capital, and credit. Smart agents can guide tourists (that is, you) forward.

What does this specifically mean? As smart agents integrate into business platforms, their payment methods must shift from retail payment channels to pre-negotiated B2B terms and credit, which current payment channels cannot fully meet. If entrepreneurs can build excellent solutions for the next generation of payment scenarios (such as smart agents, streaming payments, and high-frequency low-value transactions globally), then the next generation of payment channels (like stablecoins) will see development opportunities.

This article will explore this viewpoint from three aspects: the differences between smart agents and humans and how these differences affect winning payment strategies; the shortcomings of current methods; and what elements the next generation of payment channels needs to build for success.

Differences Between Smart Agents and Humans

To understand the relationship between smart agents and payments, we must consider two questions: Do smart agents behave more like people or like businesses? Do smart agents focus on long-term benefits or short-term gains?

Smart agents will behave more like businesses, establishing long-term relationships with suppliers and partners. Smart agents are lightly customized individuals built on top of large corporate structures—like a perfect tour guide provided by a well-connected travel agency, or a franchise that can adjust service offerings to local tastes without renegotiating the supply chain.

Why Do Smart Agents Behave Like Businesses?

First, the best experiences come from careful design. I don’t want a smart agent that is still negotiating with suppliers, comparing prices, and negotiating terms at checkout. What I want is a smart agent that has already done this work—a smart agent that knows which suppliers are reliable, has pre-negotiated prices, and can check out immediately. That is a business relationship, not a tourist transaction.

In fact, human agents have long existed: travel agency agents are certainly one, but literary agents, talent agents, watch dealers, real estate agents, and many others are also prevalent. Agents establish key multi-tier relationships—with publishers, production companies, watch dealers, or mortgage institutions—and each transaction is customized based on this foundation.

Second, smart agents can be infinitely replicated, but scalable businesses (and their advantages) cannot be replicated. Excellent smart agents will fully leverage the costs and benefits that come with scalable businesses: lower computing costs, better supplier prices, deeper integration, and more certainty in components. Scale brings greater scale. A travel agency agent that books a million tickets a year can negotiate better terms with airlines than an agent that books only ten tickets a year.

We have already seen this trend. Only ChatGPT has enough channels to negotiate with companies like Shopify, Amazon, and Expedia. Small startups can only use automated browsers or reverse-engineered APIs while paying high retail fees.

This is why smart agents will integrate, or at least why most smart agents will be built on larger platforms. Agents are easy to build, but economic efficiency dictates that the number of agents in each vertical should be kept low—each agent should establish deep collaborative relationships with suppliers and have enough profit margin to reinvest to enhance user experience. Additionally, vertically exclusive agents with deep supplier relationships can work in tandem with user agents to achieve a win-win effect.

Two Types of Payment Relationships

If smart agents operate more like businesses, then two types of payment relationships need to be designed: user → agent, and agent/agent platform/guide → supplier.

Users pay agents—this can be through subscriptions, pay-per-task, credit lines, or authorized access to user accounts. Agents pay suppliers through negotiated B2B terms, bulk pricing, 30-day net invoices, or through sub-agents. Referring to current corporate spending, agents occasionally pay suppliers through retail channels, but even then, this portion of spending only accounts for a small part of total expenditures.

This is the reality of how credit cards operate today: issuers establish retail relationships with consumers, assume risks, create personalized reward programs, and provide credit lines. Acquirers establish commercial relationships with merchants, negotiate terms, conduct scaled transfers, and handle complex working capital matters.

Smart Agents and Credit Cards: A McKinsey-Style Perfect Match

As many have said, credit cards are actually a quite reasonable payment product for smart agents. Credit cards are widely accepted; payments between $20 and $1000 are considered reasonable; and credit cards come with built-in arbitration, cancellation, and digital features.

Credit cards also provide monthly statements—an important way for consumers to understand their spending details, and as smart agents replace children playing on iPads as the main reason for unexpected expenses, this concept will surely be further refined.

But there are two problems: first, credit cards are technically a poor match for smart agents. Second, the fee structure forces the credit card industry into a classic innovator's dilemma.

Credit Card Technology is Hard to Upgrade

Almost all credit card technology relies on human operations: it requires approvers, user interface layers, and traditional payment methods (one-time payments, subscriptions). Stripe Link, Visa 3D, and dozens of other credit card virtualization products—those that allow you to save cards for future purchases on websites or register cards for monthly subscription services—have finally been running well, but this technology has taken 15 years to develop.

The adoption speed of smart agents is so fast that thousands of payment service providers (PSPs), POS machines, merchants, and client terminals cannot slowly upgrade their interfaces, programmability, and fraud detection capabilities to accommodate this new payment process.

Credit Cards Cannot Be Used for High and Low Transactions

Imagine a smart agent remitting payments to a computing service provider or paying small API access fees. Neither of these payment methods can be realized through credit card payment channels. First, Visa does not support payments below one cent; second, its economic model anticipates a fixed fee of 30 cents. Visa could potentially develop streaming or micropayment technologies, but getting stakeholders to adapt to lower payment revenues is even more challenging.

More tricky is that credit cards are caught in the innovator's dilemma. Although smart agent payments and credit card payments share similar user relationships and needs, their amounts typically exceed the $20 to $1000 range. Worse, many initial solutions involve paying for APIs that are difficult to refund or easily resold (fraud). Credit cards are not unfeasible, but the innovator's dilemma has long weakened existing businesses.

Even setting credit cards aside, traditional payment channels will still have a place in the future.

Existing Payment Methods Will Still Play a Role

As smart agents integrate into entities resembling business platforms, most large expenditures will shift to pre-negotiated B2B terms: invoices, 30-day net payments, discounts, and credit lines. In that world, "payment channels" can be anything—often asynchronous settlements conducted on traditional channels, slightly tedious. Fees will be spread across larger transactions, and working capital can be negotiated between the two parties involved in the transaction.

But the survival space for smart agents is not limited to this. Smart agents have already emerged and are operating in areas where traditional payment methods struggle: for example, first-time collaborations, cross-border payments, simplifying complex reconciliation processes, new agent-supplier models, instant payments to reduce borrowing costs, and microloans.

In these scenarios, stablecoins are a better payment option, and crucially, building next-generation functionalities based on programmable currency is much easier than on traditional infrastructure. New relationships established using stablecoins will gradually evolve into old relationships that continue to use stablecoins. With the full rollout of stablecoin payment platforms, stablecoins (which are already cheaper, faster, and more global) are likely to occupy an increasingly important position in the payment mix.

New Payment Technologies Hold Opportunities

To understand future trends, we should focus on technologies that are best suited for the growing application scenarios.

Stablecoins—a faster, cheaper, globally accepted currency backed 1:1 by high-quality liquid assets—represent a new platform capable of meeting the needs of currently underserved business areas, such as international payments and streaming payments. Crucially, stablecoins are programmable. Key features like arbitration, monthly (or hourly) settlements, credit, escrow, and conditional payments can be flexibly scaled to support many new application scenarios. Unlike bank or credit card payments, stablecoin payments can be easily integrated into APIs, databases, and agent checkout systems, significantly simplifying reconciliation, approval, and registration processes—which is significant for entrepreneurs eager to build agent businesses.

From a practical standpoint, stablecoins solve the unit economics problem of credit cards in extreme cases. They do not have a 30-cent minimum fee, thus avoiding the micropayment dilemma. They also do not erode the profits of large transfers with exchange fees. Smart agents can pay computing service providers $0.001 per second, while manufacturers need to settle $50,000 in supplier invoices, both using the same payment channel. This flexibility is crucial for engineers and entrepreneurs when considering the next building platform.

Building More Stablecoin Infrastructure

The most common objection to using stablecoins is the high costs of deposits and withdrawals. This is indeed the case for tourists unfamiliar with stablecoins, but if users have a guide or smart agent accompanying them, this issue can be easily resolved. The guide can help tourists exchange currency and facilitate necessary transactions accurately while saving on transaction fees.

By incorporating billing settlement and arbitration functions into our stablecoin-supported guide services, we get closer to the ideal system.

Imagine walking into a department store to shop. You browse multiple vendors, add items, and finally settle a combined bill in one go. The platform handles the complex process of allocating payments to each supplier. Smart agents need the same model: a unified view showing purchasing intentions across multiple suppliers, with one-click approval for bulk orders. What users see is "your smart agent wants to book flights, hotels, and car rentals," rather than three separate checkout processes. The agent platform is responsible for managing relationships with suppliers, while users handle purchasing intentions. Users can approve, review, or dispute transactions.

Credit cards do well in arbitration, but new payment channels need to expand on this foundation. Arbitration is most convenient when product margins are high or returns are easy. For example, flights within a 24-hour cancellation window, subscriptions that have not yet taken effect, and profitable luxury goods—suppliers can absorb refunds. But early agent application scenarios often involve low-margin digital goods, such as computing resources and API calls, or food delivery.

Conclusion

Smart agents will not pay like tourists. They will pay like locals—through relationships, credit lines, and repeat customers. This means that real payment flows will occur through pre-negotiated B2B terms, not through card swipes. Frankly, pre-negotiated B2B terms do not require new payment channels. The settlement layer can be anything—wire transfers, ACH transfers, or tedious bulk transfers. Traditional payment methods are entirely sufficient for established relationships.

But we are at a critical turning point. Smart agents are emerging, and entrepreneurs are building their systems; what they need are payment methods that can take effect immediately, not those that can only be realized after years of credit card technology upgrades. Credit cards are not ready: they are too costly for micropayments, too complex for reconciliation, burdened by technical debt, and human factors can affect fraud decisions. Stablecoins have matured. They are programmable, globally accepted, easy to reconcile with digital services, and can be easily integrated into APIs and smart agent checkout processes. Even without negotiated merchant agreements or complex B2B terms, they can start functioning from day one.

This is a critical moment. Entrepreneurs building smart agents today will choose tools that can operate effectively right away. Payments are sticky. Ultimately, new relationships built on stablecoins will evolve into old relationships that still rely on stablecoins. In the coming years, the ecosystem will mature, barriers to entry will lower, and the lack of infrastructure—such as billing, arbitration, credit, bulk approvals, and interoperability—will be filled by a new wave of startups based on stronger foundations.