The future of AI agents and payment networks: Q&A with Skyfire CEO and Founder Amir Sarhangi

Few companies have in-depth experience with two major trends in the financial services space: the rise of generative AI (Gen AI) and stablecoins.

Skyfire is one such company. It has risen to prominence by delivering an instant, global and open payment system, enabling fully autonomous transactions between AI agents, LLMs, data platforms, service providers and a wide range of goods and services.

From data analysis and content creation to complex problem-solving and decision-making, AI agents powered by Skyfire seamlessly act across a vast ecosystem of digital services without the need for human intervention. Businesses can deposit and withdraw U.S. dollars from Skyfire, but under the hood the platform converts those dollars into stablecoins (USDC).

For years, Citi Ventures has been tracking the impact of Gen AI on financial services. To get a good read on how Gen AI and stablecoins are likely to further transform the space, especially the evolution of payments, Jelena Zec, Director, Citi Ventures, spoke with Amir Sarhangi, Skyfire’s CEO and Founder. In the email conversation, Amir covered the outlook for fintech, the next iteration of payments and how Skyfire sees AI agents working within the digital assets space.

Fintech Outlook

Jelena (Citi Ventures): What is your outlook for the next 12 months and beyond in fintech? Are you more or less optimistic than this time last year?

Amir (Skyfire): I’m significantly more optimistic than I was a year ago, largely because we’re finally at an inflection point. The fintech boom of the last decade was about digitization – now we’re entering the automation and autonomy phase. AI agents are no longer theoretical: they are beginning to transact and that changes everything.

Agentic AI

Jelena (Citi Ventures): Do you see agentic AI disrupting financial services in the short, medium and long term? What are the most compelling use cases within financial services?

Amir (Skyfire): Most compelling consumer use case: an agent that can act on your behalf in all things, from booking airline tickets to making dinner reservations to buying birthday gifts for a friend. However, even though that’s the most compelling, it’s not what’s going to happen first, nor is it likely to make the biggest fiscal impact. I think the biggest impact will be the creation of markets that don’t exist yet.

Agentic AI and Payments

Jelena (Citi Ventures): How do you think agentic AI will change the way we facilitate payments?

Amir (Skyfire): The next million customers of enterprises will be agents, the existing networks will not be able to support them.

Payments today largely still run on rails that were built in the 1970s and 1980s. That has to change in the age of autonomous payments. Agentic payments need to be:

• Instant
• Geography-independent
• Fractional (fractions of a penny)
• Secure

Those requirements mean leveraging traditional tokenization, blockchain technology and stablecoins to transact, in addition to more traditional remuneration, and having total confidence in the identity of whatever is making the transaction – be it a person, an agent or another system entirely. The identity aspect is often overlooked, but you can’t have agent payment without providing agent identity.

“KYA” or Know Your Agent is foundational to the trust required to allow AI payments. It is also a basic requirement for agents to do anything outside of pre-determined access to pre-existing accounts, services and data.

In terms of payment use cases, there are the following:

• Automated API calls and data retrieval will (and are) happen(ing) first. Currently there are millions of instances, soon to be in the billions and in the very near future trillions of agents, calls, retrievals and expenditures
• Automatic, paid account creation for agentic workflows
  • A web developer agent signs up to a hosting platform to deploy a new website
  • A RevOps agent acquires proprietary data to create a better informed GTM strategy
  • A coding co-pilot automatically signs up to a database and authorized provider to finish an app
  • An AI assistant creates a restaurant reservation

Jelena (Citi Ventures): Who stands to win and lose in the payments value chain?

Amir (Skyfire): There will be more winners than losers. We’re talking about a massive number of net-new transactions. We are going to see payments volumes skyrocket without cannibalizing existing transactions. There’s lots of room for everyone to get a bite at this apple.

Jelena (Citi Ventures): How do you see digital assets working with agentic AI?

Finally, a problem for digital assets! Stablecoins are a perfect marriage with machines and blockchain that provide transparency, security and programmability.

Jelena (Citi Ventures): What tailwinds/headwinds do you see for agentic AI payments?

Amir (Skyfire):

• Tailwinds: The momentum around AI in general and agentic development in particular: it’s a frothy space with huge amounts of attention and investment being poured in.
• Headwinds: AI is moving at an extremely fast pace and companies will need to learn that a large number of their new customers will be AI agents. They will need to learn how to vet these new customers, provide them access and sell to them.

The Road Ahead

Jelena (Citi Ventures): Taking stock of the last 12 months, where has Skyfire seen the most traction? Then looking ahead 12 months, what are your company’s priorities?

Amir (Skyfire): We are seeing great traction from digital marketplaces, data marketplaces, agent tooling companies and websites that have valuable content. Essentially any provider with digital resources that are interested in selling to AI agents needs our solution.

Looking ahead, we plan to:

• Hire great people: lots of engineers so we can double the size of our engineering team
• Establish protocols that are simple, universal and easy to adopt
• Work with every newly established marketplaces in the AI space and existing ones to enable them to serve this new world
• Educate the market about the need for identity and payments solutions for an agent-first economy
• Acquire merchants