Ophelia

Simon is a goat. But you can admire someone without agreeing with every conclusion. I think reducing agentic commerce to cards, wallets, or new payment rails misses the bigger problem, and is a huge mistake. Payment is one part of a transaction. It doesn’t solve how an LLM figures out what someone wants, decides where to get it, navigates the business, and actually completes the purchase. So it’s neither inference or only execution, not even solely wallets or only cards. I also don’t love the question “how do agents pay?” It assumes the payment relationship has to change just because the interface does. Interfaces vary - and most will die. The end customer is still a person. Their card, account, and authorization don’t suddenly disappear bc “software” or an agent is doing the work. Look at what Meta’s Muse and Grok are doing with shopping. They’re asking users for their existing payment credentials. That’s telling. We’re already seeing that the customer doesn’t necessarily need a new wallet or a new financial instrument. The hard part is everything the agent has to do before and around the transaction. And bolting on a separate wallet, payment rail, identity layer, routing, access API, and agent framework for every new use case sounds like a pretty messy way to build this. I myself am even getting overwhelmed. I can already tell most are making the mistake of taking infrastructure designed around human-driven behavior and systems, then assuming “agents” will simply “slot” into it. Bubble behavior. And the even bigger mistake is assuming agentic commerce has to fit into the categories we already know. We’re still figuring out what this market becomes. I’d be careful about deciding what it looks like before we’ve built it. It assumes the future will look like the present, just with agents added. I wouldn’t be so quick to put it in any box, yet. Even more importantly, I love Simon and have nothing but respect for his opinions and views. Let the Gods decide 😂

Very excited to collaborate with the @AmericanExpress team and work on AI consumer experiences!! We’re spending time on how to turn user intent into a great experience consumer, focused on helping platforms understand what users actually want, act on that intent, and keep the transaction in-app. Built a way that feels native, empowering developers to innovate and users to authorize. Excited to keep building together. Grateful for the time, ideas, and conversation. Thank you @betaworks for letting us take over the legendary Fridenza :)

a real-world request is almost never: “execute API call X.” it's: “handle this for me.” when an agent's understanding of systems gets better at directing future actions from actual behavior --> autonomous products can become more than a smarter chatbot. developers want infrastructure for turning open-ended human intent into authorized decisions and completed actions. tools that create magic. 99% of the time - the smartest most talented ones are actually picky about what becomes part of their stack. they don't want to build their company around whatever AI abstraction happens to be popular this month. they choose the infrastructure that gives them more control, not another layer between them and their product. that's why they choose us.

websites are its own interface which is why browser-use is not the solution. intent should be actionable for agents.

Connectors feel like the obvious way to make the internet agentic. I think they’re a dead end. The internet won because you could go anywhere without asking the destination to integrate with your browser first. Agents should work the same way. If every service needs its own connector, you haven’t democratized access, you’ve created a toll booth in front of every website. The internet doesn’t need to become API-native for agents to use it. And merchants shouldn’t have to change anything for software to transact with them.

yup. seems like most teams are working on making models smarter or products more capable. but our team @opheliaapi is more interested in: what happens to the transaction stack once software actually understands what you want? a lot of what we call infrastructure today exists because a human has to carry intent through a bunch of intermediate steps. i think the more interesting part about agents is that they use infrastructure that by effect makes a lot these feature companies and vaults unnecessary. (in our case real-time rails and improvement decision-making) thus if intent can move directly into action, a lot of the stack and need to route disappears. i’ll be curious to see bow much of today’s transaction stack exists once agents don’t need it… ps. @betaworks might have to poach your favorite VC with all this technical support 😁

If you focus on intent —> payment, payment methods, cards, browsers, servers, type of model, none of it matters. 100% successful outcomes are possible when the model can learn in real-time from intent

Here's my issue with most agentic products right now: Everyone is racing to give agents access: virtual cards, API credentials, prepaid balances, tokens, proxies. But I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. I'm noticing many teams spending a lot of time figuring out how agents get into existing systems, without really addressing what happens once they're there. I'm not convinced the problem is simply how an agent "pays" or checks out. I think the harder question is how an LLM understands what a person actually asked it to do (intent), what the underlying system permits it to do (execution), and whether those two things are even the same (benchmark + auditing). It reminds me a lot of the early EDI days with Amazon and the supply chain in the 90s. Getting different systems connected was one problem, but getting them to actually understand and coordinate with one another is an entirely different one. A few things worth noticing: 1 / payment can clear and still be the wrong purchase 2 / credential can be valid and the transaction can still be wrong 3 / access doesn't equal authorization + authorization doesn't equal intent I don't think a card or another API wrapper gets us much closer to solving this. What concerns me is that we're approaching a systemic problem through a collection of isolated solutions. You have to understand the entire transaction lifecycle: the consumer, the merchant, the financial rails, permissions, exceptions, failure modes, and what happens when something inevitably goes wrong. This is also why our team has been spending so much time on the underlying financial infrastructure, particularly for the next generation of consumer products that will increasingly act on behalf of people. There's a broader point here about engineering that I think gets lost in all the excitement around AI. It's never been easier to generate software, except I don't think that means we've made engineering any less difficult. If you've actually spent time architecting and maintaining software, you know how quickly seemingly insignificant decisions compound. A shortcut in one layer becomes a problem somewhere else, an abstraction that works in a demo becomes a constraint in production. Eventually, someone has to understand the whole thing well enough to fix it. The engineers I respect use AI to move faster, audit their work, test assumptions, and challenge their own thinking. But they aren't outsourcing their understanding of the system to a model. You can use AI to get there faster, you cannot throw tokens at your way into great architecture. Infrastructure is one of the few areas of technology where the underlying engineering still has to be deliberate, considered, and built to last. I think that's going to become increasingly obvious as this category matures. Great products are built on great infrastructure.

- 2 security breaches - sending unwarranted messages based on data users were unaware of granting access to - 30% take rate on transactions when I couldn’t even successfully order anything related to retail this “merchant” data seems more just like “user” data. did we not learn from @Meta’s 25B payout for lies over user privacy?

Intent will swallow the entire stack of execution. Swallow agent merchant access, swallow cards, swallow all of it. He is right.

you can now text an agent "purchase the items in my @amazon cart now, and add a pair of @UGG boots" and it just…completes the request! proud to bring @opheliaapi to every agent on @onkeiki. restaurants, flights, hotels, tickets, retail, grocery shopping. takes a few minutes to set up. builders, go cook. intent is the new interface.🦾😤