The payments industry has always been defined by technology; it is built on software, data, and real-time decisionmaking. That’s why AI has such transformative potential in the sector.
To capture this opportunity, however, AI should not be used simply to fine-tune existing workflows. Already, the companies creating the most value have put AI at the center of their operations, deploying the technology to reshape how they build products, serve customers, and organize themselves. Compared to companies that take a narrow view of AI, these AI-first companies will increasingly enjoy a structural competitive advantage.
The AI Opportunity
Consumer behavior is changing quickly. GenAI-supported shopping rose 35% in 2025, and more than 60% of consumers now trust AI to guide their purchase decisions, according to a BCG survey of nine major economies. Agentic commerce, in which AI assists or manages product discovery, merchant selection, tender choice, and payment execution, has moved from concept to live deployment, with launches from major retailers, technology platforms, card networks, and AI companies. The purchase journey is already becoming more automated, more personalized, and more programmable.
For payments companies, this opens up powerful new ways to serve customers and capture value. Tender choice and routing can be optimized in real time. Offers and incentives can be tailored per transaction. Risk controls and identity verification become sharper differentiators as more commerce flows through AI-mediated channels.
How Leaders Are Pulling Ahead
The payments companies winning with AI today are following three strategies that are widening the gap between them and everyone else. They are:
Staking a position in the agentic commerce journey. As AI increasingly mediates how consumers discover products, choose merchants, select payment methods, and complete transactions, payments companies need to be embedded in that flow. The winners are building the infrastructure and partnerships to ensure their products surface when an agent makes a decision—not after.
Building AI-native products and services, and shipping them dramatically faster. Payments companies are bringing to market a new generation of AI-enabled offerings for customers, including:
- Smarter fraud and risk management tools.
- AI-powered spend management.
- Real-time loyalty and incentive engines.
- Intelligent onboarding and underwriting solutions.
These are not incremental feature updates; they are new sources of revenue and differentiation.
The increased speed of product rollout is equally important: leading platforms have cut the time between product launches by half. And the effects compound—the faster you ship, the more you learn, the further ahead you pull.
Fundamentally overhauling the operating model. The shift is from a model in which people drive core processes with AI as a supplement to one where AI agents drive core processes with human oversight. Dispute resolution, fraud orchestration, routing, pricing—these are increasingly run by agents in real time, with humans setting guardrails and handling exceptions. The financial impact speaks for itself. We see first movers unlocking 20% to 30% operating profit expansion through revenue growth, risk reduction, and cost takeout. Over time, competitive dynamics will compress some of that advantage as AI-first approaches become a baseline requirement, but early movers can expect to hold a durable 10% to15% edge.
The Longer-Term Opportunity
Looking further out, the underlying models of commerce may themselves evolve. Connected IoT devices are projected to nearly double by 2030, and industry data shows automated web traffic already exceeds human activity. Agent-to-agent transactions, such as machines paying machines for compute, bandwidth, verification, and micro-tasks, could unlock new categories of payment flows. The scale of this opportunity is still taking shape, but payments companies that have built AI-native infrastructure will be best positioned to capture it.
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Becoming an AI-First Payments Company
This level of transformational change needs to be CEO-led. CEOs must:
Focus effort. Choose three to five enterprise bets tied to P&L impact, such as new AI-enabled products, faster development cycles, an agentic commerce strategy, or internal automation at scale. A handful of scaled, well-resourced bets will consistently outperform a sprawl of disconnected pilots.
Fund and govern for success. Back each bet with real capital, top talent, and end-to-end ownership of data, models, and operations. Stand up an empowered project management office to drive cadence, adoption, and accountability. Link AI investment explicitly to enterprise value, such as earnings or TSR, so that everyone in the organization understands what the spend is for and what it is producing.
Transform culture and the operating model. Redesign the organization so that AI is embedded in core decisionmaking, not bolted on. Payments stacks need to expose secure, governable interfaces so agents can discover, negotiate, and execute transactions. Hardwire KPIs to outcomes. Change how work gets done.
The opportunity is enormous—and it is available right now. The leaders who move decisively to build AI-native products, accelerate their development, and reshape their organizations will define the next era of payments.
