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Visa and Artemis warn AI agent payments face infrastructure gaps
The joint report says cards were designed for low frequency human transactions, while AI agents need near zero fees and faster settlement for micropayments to scale.
Visa and investment thesis platform Artemis said the current payments infrastructure is not yet equipped to support the emerging autonomous AI agent economy, citing bottlenecks that are slowing broader commercial adoption.
In a joint report released Wednesday, the companies argued that traditional card networks were built for human commerce with low frequency transactions, which does not fit agentic micropayments that require near zero fees and faster settlement.
The report said AI agents crossed a key capability threshold in mid 2025, enabling them to discover unfamiliar APIs, evaluate prices, and trigger autonomous payments, which raises the operational demands on payment rails.
It also pointed to growing experiments and early traction, including Coinbase’s x402 payment protocol, which processed $15 million in adjusted volume across over 109 million adjusted transactions since its May 2025 launch, and saw monthly transaction counts rise from 40,000 to 3.8 million by October 2025.