AI is having its “main character” moment in nearly every industry, and payments are no exception.
In a recent article, PYMNTS explored the rise of agentic AI in financial services, payments, and B2B commerce. These AI “agents” aren’t just answering support chats or summarizing reports. They’re designed to act autonomously, initiating payments, making underwriting decisions, managing fraud detection, and yes, even orchestrating complex workflows.
It’s an eye-catching vision of the future: tireless, decision-making bots optimizing payments flows without human input.
But here’s the catch: before companies can hand over the keys to AI agents, they need roads to drive on.
And right now, too many payments systems are still stuck on dirt paths.
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Orchestration isn’t optional: It’s foundational.
At Modo, we think about payments orchestration as the connective tissue between systems. It’s what lets a business route a transaction intelligently, based on rules about cost, risk, timing, or customer preferences. It’s the layer where payments complexity gets untangled.
Without orchestration in place, it doesn’t really matter how smart your AI agents are: They’ll simply hit dead ends in disconnected systems.
In fact, several payments execs quoted by PYMNTS alluded to this themselves. As Stax’s CTO put it:
“If agentic AI is the engine, orchestration is the transmission.”
We couldn’t agree more. You need that transmission to ensure agents aren’t acting in isolation or driving systems into chaos. Orchestration aligns the moving parts, AI agents included.
AI Agents are cool, but control still rules.
Let’s be honest: AI-powered payments agents make for great headlines.
But for most companies, the bigger priority isn’t unleashing autonomous bots. It’s getting better control over their existing payments flows right now.
That’s where orchestration delivers value today:
- Routing payments to the lowest-cost provider
- Improving authorization rates
- Reducing failed transactions
- Gaining visibility into transaction performance across providers
- Making incremental, testable changes without overhauling everything
These aren’t futuristic use cases. They’re what we help businesses solve every day.
The Real Roadmap: Orchestrate first. Automate smartly.
We’re not anti-AI. In fact, we see a future where advanced AI agents could play a smart, role-based part in payments, especially as orchestration platforms become more composable and intelligent themselves.
But the truth is, orchestration isn’t just a stepping stone to agentic AI. It’s the foundation that makes any future innovation possible, whether it’s autonomous payments, smarter retry logic, or real-time optimization of payments flows.
So before you hire those AI agents, make sure you’ve built the infrastructure they’ll need to succeed.
If you’re still figuring out your payments “transmission,” we should talk.