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In a recent episode of the Mostly Growth podcast, Metronome CEO Scott Woody shared his thoughts on what happens to pricing in a future where the buyer is no longer human. The Metronome team elaborated on Scott’s perspective, exploring what the end-state of agent-driven purchasing might look like.
They covered what happens to AI credits, what teams should be thinking about now, and whether pricing and billing infrastructure will hold up when the buyer is an agent. Read more on how agents are forcing a rethink of monetization.
👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
I’m running the second annual State of B2B Monetization survey to see how tech companies are adapting their pricing models in the age of AI. If you’re passionate about this topic, too, please consider taking the 5-minute survey. It’ll make us all smarter. The results will be shared back in this newsletter in May.
Your next customer might be an AI agent, whether you’re ready or not.
This could sound a bit like science fiction. Some of the early experiments, including Walmart’s agentic commerce partnership with OpenAI, haven’t panned out (they’re now testing a new model where Walmart’s AI agent gets embedded directly within ChatGPT).
But this isn’t as far off as it might seem.
AI already recommends which products to buy. It helps buyers negotiate with sellers. If you're building an app with an AI agent like Claude Code, you're primed to delegate at least some decision making to a trusted agent. And now AI agents are getting their own credit cards!
Some signs that agentic commerce is coming, even for B2B products:
Ramp introduced Agent Cards (in beta), positioned as a safe way for agents to spend money. AI agents get a tokenized card tied to a specific transaction. Human users (and companies) can set their own policies including spending limits, approval workflows, and expense category restrictions.
Mastercard and Google partnered on an open standard to verify AI agent transactions. This is meant to help verify whether a human actually authorized the purchase, whether the agent followed instructions exactly, and how to prove it.
Stripe reflected on six months since launching its Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI. The leading takeaway: “In practice, getting ‘ingestion-ready’ product data is what determines whether you show up reliably across agent surfaces.”
Vercel expanded the ability to buy via command in your CLI including credits, add-ons, subscriptions, and domains. This is the plumbing to buy as part of an agentic workflow.
Prospects are showing up ready to buy, spending less time on your website and more time in AI answer engines. Zero-click purchases feel like an inevitability, likely beginning with developer tools and commodity products. The question is: will you be ready when AI agents start buying?
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