When AI Stops Asking and Starts Acting

Today, an AI can do more than flag a supplier invoice, it can settle the payment under a verified mandate and record every step with an auditable trail. It can move beyond preparing expense reports to filing them directly into your ERP, updating records seamlessly.

This isn’t a future vision. It’s the foundation of the agentic internet, and the rails are being laid right now.

The Quiet Announcements That Change Everything

In the last few days, two major moves signaled a shift:

• Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2): backed by 60+ partners like Mastercard, PayPal, AmEx, Coinbase. It allows agents to make payments using secure “mandates” across cards, real-time transfers, even stablecoins.
• Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP): a secure way for agents to connect with company systems and data, without messy integrations.

On the surface, these sound like technical standards. In reality, they are the new rails of the internet.

From Drafting to Doing

For years, AI has been a helpful assistant. Summaries, drafts, insights. Useful, but never final.

Now, agents are crossing the line from suggesting to executing.

• They won’t just flag a supplier invoice. They’ll pay it.
• They won’t just draft a contract. They’ll file it.
• They won’t just recommend a trade. They’ll execute it.

This is the agentic internet, a world where work moves from human-checked tasks to autonomous, accountable actions.

Why This Matters to C-Level Executives

• Governance is a first order problem. Agents with transaction power demand new control frameworks: revocation, audit trails, obligation guardrails.
• Competition will cluster early. Those who build or shape these rails will define user expectations and standards.
• Risk now has a new axis. If an agent acts wrongly, who is legally liable? The enterprise, the merchant, or the agent infrastructure?

The organizations that understand protocols, mandates, audit trails, and governance layers today will lead tomorrow.

What Smart Leaders Should Do Now

1. Get fluent in the underlying language - “Mandates,” “verifiable credentials,” “agent endpoint roles” - know them as well as revenue, capex, ROI.
2. Pilot with full traceability - Start small: allow agents to transact in low-risk domains (e.g. expense settlements, subscription renewals) with full ability to revoke and audit every step.
3. Think about partner leverage - You don’t have to build everything from scratch. Stake your claim now in the protocols and standards, whether via industry groups, open source, or alliances.

The Bigger Picture

Think back to the 1990s. We had isolated apps: email clients, FTP, browser, telnet. The web was fragmented. Then HTTP, SMTP, TCP/IP became shared protocols. They didn’t make the content - they made interaction possible.

These protocols enabled the modern internet, by creating rails on which innovation could be built.

AP2 / MCP / A2A are to the “agentic internet” what HTTP / TCP / SMTP were to the human internet. Once you standardize how agents communicate and transact, you unlock a new ecosystem.

The question for leaders is simple: Will you let the rails be built for you, or will you help design them?

Because in this era, it won’t be the flashiest model that wins. It will be the organizations with foresight, governance, and courage to operationalize early.