AI agents are everywhere. They're booking meetings, resolving support tickets, qualifying leads, handling insurance claims.
But watch what happens when one tries to take a payment.
The conversation stops. The agent hands off to a human. Or redirects to a checkout page. Or drops the interaction entirely.
That's not a feature gap. That's an infrastructure gap.
The agent economy has a payment problem
Every AI agent company building something useful will eventually hit the same question: how does this thing get paid?
Not "how do we integrate Stripe." That's the easy version. The real question is harder.
How do you take a payment mid-conversation, over voice, inside a platform you don't control, with a PSP you didn't choose, while staying PCI compliant?
That's the question nobody planned for.
PolyAI figured this out early. Their AI voice agents handle complex, high-value conversations for enterprise brands. Insurance claims. Travel bookings. Sales calls. When the conversation reaches a payment moment, it needs to happen right there, in the voice channel, without breaking the flow.
They didn't build payment infrastructure. They plugged into Shuttle's Voice Checkout.
As Nathan Liu at PolyAI put it: "Shuttle let us treat legacy payment providers as a modern SaaS service. It enabled us to support the gateways our customers required and fully automate high-value transactions across regulated industries."
That's the pattern. The agent handles the conversation. Shuttle handles the payment. The end customer never leaves the channel.
Why this is harder than it looks
AI agents don't operate in a single, controlled environment. They sit inside platforms. Those platforms have enterprise customers. Those customers have existing PSP relationships, compliance requirements, and procurement rules.
An AI voice agent selling insurance policies for Allianz can't just use any payment provider. It needs to use the one Allianz already has a contract with. And it needs to do it without touching card data. Over the phone.
That's three problems at once:
PSP optionality. The agent needs to work with whatever provider the end merchant already uses. Not one provider. Dozens.
Channel compliance. Voice payments require PCI DSS Level 1 infrastructure. Most AI companies aren't going to build that.
Platform neutrality. The payment layer can't create lock-in or dependency. It needs to sit underneath, invisibly.
No single PSP solves this. Stripe doesn't support non-Stripe gateways. Adyen wants to be the PSP, not a layer underneath one. Building it yourself means 12 months of dev time and ongoing PCI scope you never wanted.
The infrastructure that's actually needed
What AI agents need is a payment layer. Not a payment provider. Not a checkout page. A layer that connects to the PSPs already in play, across whatever channel the agent operates in.
That's what Shuttle is.
One integration gives an AI agent access to 40+ PSPs across voice, chat, SMS, and embedded flows. PCI DSS Level 1 certified. The agent never touches card data. The platform never manages PSP relationships. The merchant keeps their existing provider.
Voice Checkout handles the real-time, in-conversation payment moment. Payment Links handle the asynchronous flows, where the agent sends a branded checkout link via SMS or chat mid-conversation. Both sit on the same multi-PSP layer underneath.
Where this is going
The first wave of AI agents replaced workflows. The next wave will replace revenue channels.
AI voice agents are already closing sales that used to require human agents. AI chat agents are handling upsells inside support conversations. AI-driven systems are triggering payment collection without any human involvement.
Every one of those moments needs payment infrastructure. Not a checkout page bolted on after the fact. Infrastructure that's already there, already compliant, already connected to the right PSP.
The companies building AI agents are moving fast. They're not going to slow down to become payments companies.
They need a payment layer.
That's the infrastructure Shuttle provides. And it's why we built it to be agent-ready from day one. Voice-native. Multi-PSP. Channel-agnostic. Invisible to the end customer.
The agentic commerce future isn't theoretical. It's already in production. The only question is whether the payment infrastructure can keep up.
Related Reading
The First Agentic Payments Went Live — What the infrastructure looks like behind Razorpay's live agentic payments
Why Platforms Don't Want to Be Payment Companies — The PayFac trap and why platforms need a payment layer instead
Where PSP Distribution Actually Lives — How PSP distribution is shifting to embedded platform infrastructure
Agentic Commerce — The hub for agentic commerce and AI-driven payment infrastructure
Agentic Payments Infrastructure in 2026 — The full landscape of agentic payment infrastructure
The Voice AI Payment Infrastructure Gap — Why voice AI companies can't solve payments alone
Embedded Payments for CCaaS — How contact centre platforms are embedding payments into voice workflows