In the future you’ll have a team. That team will be digital, and it will do any kind of work for you that you wish, whether in your career or home or social life.
Some of those agents will be super-agents. Think your majordomo, or chief of staff, or executive assistant. To accomplish some of the tasks you give them, these super-agents are going to hire other agents: specialized agents, domain-specific expert agents, and agents with unique access to resources, services, or equipment.
And they’re gonna need your credit card.
That’s what former PayPal exec Jim Nguyen just built:
“What we enable is the ability for an agent, who’s a new customer, to transact with others. We think of humans as customers — maybe your children are customers of the web and mobile — but this is a new customer that has completely different ways to interact with payment systems.”
Jim Nguyen
He calls the platform InFlow, and it gives AI agents the ability to pay for services, to pay each other, and to pay companies in your name. In other words, InFlow makes AI agents actual full-fledge agents in the true old-school sense: entities that can transact in your name, make deals in your name, do work with others in your name.
Agents can do a lot already: summarize documents, send emails, add tasks to your calendar, fix images, research companies, make memes. Anything you can imagine AI doing, you can build an agent to do autonomously or semi-autonomously.
But before today, they couldn’t pay each other.
That means you had to still intervene and do the detail grunt work of setting up accounts, provisioning services, providing credit cards, and setting payment limits.
Think of the possibilities.
Your your AI exec assistant could hire specialized agents to:
provide legal review of a contract
manage a kid’s sport schedule and school events so you’re not double-booked
get nutrition consults on a meal plan
optimize your purchasing based on finding better deals
get high-level financial insight on your retirement planning
turn your photography habit into a side hustle
get architectural review of your AI-generated new house plans
or … anything else
You’ll probably set limits for spending before your AI EA has to talk to you, but within the guardrails, your EA manages it all.
It’s not “have your people talk to my people” anymore. It’s have your agents talk to my agents.
We already have agent marketplaces like agent.ai by HubSpot. Now, with a payments layer, we start employing them in entirely new ways.
The big question now is … can we even imagine what this world of the future will look like, work like, and live like?
Think headless stores: no UI, no website, just agent-optimized commerce. It’ll be the modern equivalent of ghost kitchens. Think HR for agents. Identity and enforcement layers for agents so we monitor activity and eliminate rogue or fraudulent agents. Micro-contracts and micropayments negotiated in milliseconds. Virtual teams that exist for seconds, then dissolve as no longer needed. Decommissioning protocols as agents you never knew you contracted with leave your employment and have to delete all personal and work-related data for your future privacy and security.
It’s a wild, wild frontier.
