New Agentic Payment Abilities and Features Explored
The 5 layers of Agentic Payments in 2026; what product teams need to know. Examples from Stripe, Adyen, Coinbase, Mastercard, and more.
Stripe’s Head of AI, Emily Sands, recently declared that “the internet has a new economic actor,” arguing that the economic infrastructure of the internet has changed forever.
She says that over the last six months, agents have become a new kind of actor on the internet; while ecommerce was built for humans who click pricing pages, enter cards and navigate checkout flows, agents don’t do any of that. Instead, they need a programmatic way to understand a product, including what it costs and how to pay - without manually clicking through a product’s UI in the way a human would.
This rapid evolution of payments in recent months has led to new technologies, protocols and features that could transform our understanding of payments on the web.
And in this DoP deep dive, we’ll take a closer look at some of these new advances in payment abilities and features from a product perspective so that you’re fully up to speed with how these technologies might impact the future of in-product payments.
Coming up:
The 5 layers of the agentic payment stack explored - new payment technologies, features and protocols explained
Protocols - how agents discover your product and understand how to pay for it
Credentials and wallets - how agents pay without holding raw card credentials
Identity and trust - how agents prove they are legitimate and that a human authorised the transaction
Billing and monetisation - how businesses charge for consumption rather than seats
Settlement rails - how money moves at the speed and scale agents actually require
Considerations for product teams - what product teams need to know about these new agentic payment technologies and features
Do users care? Consumer and business attitudes towards agentic payments with deep dive reports for further reading
The 5 layers of Agentic Payments: making sense of new technologies, features and protocols
Here’s a snapshot of the 5 layers of the agentic payments stack which have seen the most disruption during the past year:
In this Deep Dive, we’ll use these layers to contextualize each of the new technologies and features that have been released in recent months in more detail, explaining what impact they potentially have on product teams.