AI beyond the enterprise
Originally published by Business Reporter
The growth of AI agents within the enterprise is well underway. We’re quickly approaching a future where they’ll replace human workers, make machines run faster, and handle increasingly complex requests. This is the kind of linear innovation we see at the beginning of every major technological shift, where new technology is used to make everything cheaper, faster or more convenient.
But as we’ve experienced with similar shifts in the past, the era-defining innovations aren’t the linear ones; they’re the non-linear ones. Not faster and cheaper, but totally unforeseen. They seem to arrive without notice, with no precursor. With AI Agents, that innovation won’t happen inside businesses, but at their front doors. Agents will fundamentally change the way that companies and customers interact with each other.
Just as companies will have AI agents, customers will need them too. Not chatbots that answer questions, but AI that can act on their behalf to book, organise, pay, negotiate, retrieve, notify and make decisions to reduce mental load and act at machine speeds. Companies, in turn, will need to provide a way for customer agents to do all this in a manner that is both safe and tailored to them.
That’s going to need new infrastructure: the Agentic Wallet.
What is an Agentic Wallet?
An Agentic Wallet is a secure, personal environment that enables AI agents to operate on behalf of individuals. It has access to relevant data, identity, credentials and preferences without compromising privacy or control. It combines elements of a digital wallet, identity vault and data access layer, allowing an AI to “know what it needs to know” and act accordingly.
For example, with an Agentic Wallet, your AI agent could plan your travel, not just by searching public timetables but by understanding your frequent flyer status, knowing your dietary preferences, cross-referencing your calendar, and even using recent spending data to suggest appropriate budget options. Critically, the AI never needs to permanently hold or export that information. It can simply access it under clear, time-bound permissions controlled by you and make its decisions.
This is nothing new. It’s an architecture that mirrors the trust boundaries that exist in human personal assistant relationships; access is available where necessary, with context when helpful, all under complete discretion.
Why traditional AI interfaces fall short
Today’s AI tools are still largely conversational. To personalise their output, you, the user, have to prompt them manually, a process that’s cumbersome and insecure.
Enterprise AI agents circumvent this problem by being directly integrated into internal systems (often facilitated by Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol) or trained on proprietary data. But average consumers don’t have that. If you want an AI to know your health conditions, spending habits or location history, you have to paste them into a text box.
What’s missing is a way to give an AI agent just enough access to act intelligently on your behalf, without losing control or security. That’s precisely the role Agentic Wallets are designed to fill.
The next wave of wallet innovation
Traditional digital wallets store static items: payment cards, boarding passes, ID credentials. We’re using them to buy a coffee, get on a plane or prove we can drive a car. But leading financial and identity players are now exploring how wallets can evolve into dynamic environments, capable of interacting with services, responding to context and even initiating actions.
Visa, for instance, launched its Intelligent Commerce product suite in May, allowing AI builders to safely use Visa payment cards and customer data. As a result, agents can personalise shopping recommendations on behalf of individual cardholders and then make seamless and safe purchases.
In the Intelligent Commerce world, Agentic Wallets aren’t a radical departure but the next logical step in expanding the amount and type of data available to individuals and their agents. In fact, Visa has already announced plans to make Agentic Wallets available to their network.
The opportunity for us all is enormous. Every interaction that currently requires logging into a service, re-identifying yourself, re-entering preferences, or confirming a transaction could be abstracted into a single agentic flow: one where your AI assistant acts, and you govern using your wallet.
Serving people, not platforms
Of course, giving AI agents access to deeply personal data introduces huge risk. The default path we’re on, giving our all of data to our favorite AI, is a treacherous slope. There’s a growing risk that consumer-facing AI will mimic the platform dynamics of the Web today; centralised, extractive, and optimised for engagement rather than agency.
Agentic Wallets are an antidote to that. They create an AI experience that’s personal without becoming invasive, because they are built on firm foundations: open standards, selective disclosure, and transparent permissions.
This means no vendor lock-in. No opaque data scraping. And no default sharing with platforms. Instead, Agentic Wallets enable people to delegate specific data to specific agents for specific tasks and, most importantly, take it back when they want.
These foundations don’t just protect individuals; they benefit companies as well as their customers. It’s vital for companies to maintain direct, loyal customer relationships.
If centralised platforms are the only ones that can deliver a personal AI experience to customers — like OpenAI is already trying to do with its “memory” feature — then they will be the ones to benefit from access to customer data. They will set the new rules of business on the agentic internet. Other companies will only have the chance to serve their customers if the platforms decide to allow it.
The solution for companies is the same construct — Agentic Wallets. They give customers the tools to turn any AI interaction, provided by any company, into a personal one. And now businesses have a new, consent-rich channel to engage with customers through their respective trusted AI agents.
A foundation for the future
We’re entering a world where AI will increasingly act as our interface to the world. Agentic Wallets are what make that future a safe one. They give us the infrastructure to delegate, without being disempowered, to share data without giving it away, and to benefit from intelligent automation without losing sight of who it serves.
As enterprise AI continues to scale, it’s time we invested in the parallel systems needed for individuals. Agentic Wallets are the foundation for a more open, more trusted, more human digital future.
