Is Your Payment Infrastructure Ready for Agentic Payments?

Agentic payments, facilitated by AI agents that autonomously execute transactions, are reshaping the payments landscape by demanding higher levels of real-time settlement, continuous availability, and automated risk controls, which traditional infrastructures may not support. As this form of commerce is projected to reach significant economic impact by 2030, payments platforms must transition from "click to buy" to "delegate to buy" models, requiring robust backend systems that can handle increased workloads and maintain transactional correctness. This shift amplifies the need for strong ledger-grade guarantees to manage the concurrency and complexity inherent in agentic transactions, which involve numerous state transitions such as authorization, fraud control, and dispute resolution. CockroachDB is positioned as a solution, offering transactional consistency and resilience required for these high-churn, real-time workloads by integrating vector search capabilities within its storage engine. For payments companies to successfully implement agentic systems, they must ensure their infrastructure can withstand regional failures, provide deterministic evidence of transaction validity, and prevent unintended financial consequences, ultimately turning correctness and accountability into core features of their payment solutions.