AI using AI to pay for AI? It could soon become a reality.
As AI systems become more ubiquitous, those systems will further interact with other AI systems, requesting data, resources, or functionalities. They’ll also need to pay for those requests, in many cases, which will require transactions. Typically, that’d require some human interaction—but not if a payment system exists that allows for autonomous payments between those systems, which is exactly what one firm has in mind.
Nevermined—a company that provides AI payment infrastructure—recently announced that it’s raised $4 million to build out and further develop a system that will allow for AI-to-AI transactions. In effect, the company is developing what it describes as a “PayPal for AI,” which won’t require human interaction.
AI agents are a type of artificial intelligence system that can perform certain tasks without any human intervention, such as collect or analyze data, answer customer questions, and more. They’re already being used by numerous companies, such as Amazon. In some respects, they’re designed to, and are actively replacing human workers. And now, it seems that Nevermined is determined to help them transact with one another, removing even more human fingerprints from the mix.
“The future of commerce isn’t just about humans trading with humans anymore. It’s about AI agents transacting with other AI agents, and we need entirely new payment systems to facilitate that,” said Don Gossen, CEO of Nevermined, in a release provided to Fast Company. “This funding will allow us to accelerate our mission of building the financial rails for the emerging AI economy.”
The new payment infrastructure will be one of the first of its kind, and has some heavyweights behind it. Nevermined was founded by Don Gossen and Aitor Argomaniz, who previously founded Ocean Protocol, a decentralized data exchange protocol and platform, and Nevermined’s investors include Valory, Naptha, and others.
Will it work?
As for why this all matters? For one, it’ll likely be the first time that humans have not actively participated in an active micro-economy. What that means going forward is anyone’s guess—but for now, an AI-incorporated future is looking a lot less like a scary “Terminator” scenario, and more like a real-time strategy game, in which non-playable characters transact automatically.
From a technology perspective, facilitating payments between AI agents shouldn’t look all that different from a human-to-human transaction, at least at this point, according to Dimitri Dadiomov, the cofounder and CEO of Modern Treasury, a payment operations platform. “But every AI agent would need a bank account,” he says, which could be owned by the agents’ respective owner.
Dadiomov says some other kinks might be in the mix, too, such as hallucinations or erroneous transaction data. That could cause problems, but it’s likely that will get sorted out over time, but for now, he has a hard time believing that finance teams and CFOs will sleep soundly having handed off transactions to an AI system.
“The accounting department is not going to be the early adopter in your company,” he says. “A controller isn’t going to trust the AI agent, and they’ll want the human to look things over.”
