One of the convergences that I think is going to be transformative in business is Agentic AI and instant payments.
Setting aside the challenges of Agentic* (non-deterministic risk bubble, something goes boom), it seems likely that use of agentic will progress pretty fast. There will be a number of things it's really well suited for, especially with smaller, specialized models. Fairly repetitive processes, some evaluation and response required, but based on ingestable data inputs and fairly well defined context: seems well suited to Agentic AI.
So I can see a world where business processes become faster, more efficient, as multi-agent orchestration replaces queues, processes, humans and workflows. Supply chain, distribution, order management and product fulfilment seem like great candidates for this.
But...
What happens when it comes time to move the money? Processes get faster and faster, more real time or just-in-time, and then... just wait a couple of days, or weeks to invoice and process payments? Instead of process, invoicing and payments are going to become the bottleneck.
As economist David Hume noted 250 some years ago, money oils the wheels of trade. As those wheels become increasingly interlinked, the monetary lubricant of payments is going to become increasingly important to reduce the friction in processes of interlined businesses, without waiting for ACH to process, invoices to mail, and checks to clear.
The tools that instant payments offer will really come into play to drive integrated just-in-time business processes. Request for Payment (RFP) and the ability for agents to process those RFP's - and act on them by making instant payments dynamically is going to make nimble, dynamic, responsive processes a competitive advantage, while improving cashflow and inventory management for example.
This is an inversion of what I originally expected before Agentic emerged: that once businesses realized they could optimize cashflow around payments, they'd start to reorchestrate processes. Now, I think we'll see technology simply making processes much faster first, thus highlighting the need for payments innovation and process reorchestration.
Very exciting from a payments perspective. If I were consulting, I'd be salivating at the chance to drive some of this transformation.
*It's still not clear to me that Agentic implementations aren't going to cause some very big, very visible problems that will trigger a rapid slide into the Trough of Disillusionment.
Originally published on LinkedIn.