The Prompt Economy Has Arrived. Now Comes the Hard Part

One of the most compelling updates this week came from a Harvard Business Review article “Designing a Successful Agentic AI System.” Its authors argue that agentic AI will only deliver value when companies redesign workflows around outcomes, not tasks, and rethink how humans and intelligent systems collaborate.

The authors describe agentic AI as a “team of digital colleagues” capable of autonomous reasoning, planning and coordination across departments, freeing organizations from the limits of rules-based automation. Case studies from Hitachi Digital, NTT DATA and Bigblue show how these systems can rewire complex operations by turning fragmented, multi-system environments into seamless, outcome-driven workflows. To do this successfully, organizations must appoint “mission owners” who define and oversee goals, empower AI agents to act toward them and structure work around results rather than departments.

The authors outline three imperatives for building agentic AI systems: design around outcomes and clear accountability; unlock data silos through shared business logic rather than perfect data centralization; and develop leaders and governance frameworks capable of supervising autonomous systems responsibly. They stress that agentic AI doesn’t demand flawless or unified data. It does demand interoperable systems, clear logic and human oversight. Leaders, they write, must be willing to delegate to digital teammates while maintaining guardrails for transparency, security and escalation. Companies that begin with high-friction workflows, assign ownership and build governance into design will, they conclude, “write the playbook for the operating model of the future.”

“Agentic AI marks a significant evolution in intelligent automation,” the article states. “Guided by human supervision, it becomes an intelligent layer that links scattered processes and cuts through silos into a more seamless flow.”

Securing the Revolution

In order for agentic commerce to work, it will of course need to be secured. Cloudflare’s October 2025 blog post, “Securing Agentic Commerce: Helping AI Agents Transact with Visa and Mastercard,” by Rohin Lohe and Will Allen, explains how the next phase of digital payments, commerce executed by AI agents, will require a new trust framework between consumers, merchants and payment networks.

To that end, Cloudflare is partnering with Visa and Mastercard to develop infrastructure that authenticates AI agents through cryptographic protocols. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard’s Agent Pay both rely on Web Bot Auth, a Cloudflare proposal that uses public-key cryptography and HTTP message signatures to verify that an agent acting on a consumer’s behalf is legitimate, authorized and non-replayable. This system lets merchants instantly recognize registered agents and determine whether they are browsing or making payments, without confusing helpful AI assistants for malicious bots.

Cloudflare’s approach makes agentic transactions verifiable across the full ecosystem — developers, merchants, networks and consumers — without overhauling existing merchant infrastructure. The authentication flow allows Cloudflare to validate agent requests by checking cryptographic keys, timestamps and nonce uniqueness before forwarding a verified transaction.

Over the coming months, Cloudflare plans to integrate Visa’s and Mastercard’s protocols into its Agent SDK, enabling developers to easily manage agent keys, create valid signatures and transact securely using standard APIs. This shared security layer, the company notes, ensures that trusted agents can interact with merchant sites safely while maintaining full compliance with payment networks’ trust requirements. As the authors put it, “The era of agentic commerce is coming, and it brings with it significant new challenges for security.”

Checking in With Global Banks

Banks are starting to add their own flavor of thought leadership to the agentic debate as well. In a piece titled “Agentic AI: A Strategic Shift in Business Evolution,” UBS Chief Technology Officer and Technology Fellow Mitra Heravizadeh positions agentic AI as a foundational inflection point, not a passing trend.

For UBS, becoming an “AI-enabled institution” means embedding autonomous intelligence directly into its operational fabric, from decision-making and market prediction to client engagement. Heravizadeh writes that AI agents will function as “intelligent collaborators,” executing multi-step tasks once handled by humans and enabling a move from reactive problem-solving to proactive opportunity creation. To achieve this, UBS is re-architecting its digital infrastructure around agility, interoperability and continuous learning, what it calls the core design principles of the agentic enterprise.

The post details how UBS is restructuring its operating model to manage and govern AI agents responsibly. IT teams will evolve to oversee autonomous systems through defined permissions, behavioral monitoring and compliance oversight. To scale this transformation, UBS has created an Agentic AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to coordinate innovation and maintain ethical, secure and standardized deployment across engineering, data science and compliance teams.

The CoE’s mission is to establish a shared language and governance blueprint so AI agents can “communicate, collaborate, and operate together in a compliant, secure, and ethical manner.” As Heravizadeh puts it, “Agentic AI is not a future trend — it’s a present reality,” one that will shape the next era of financial innovation and institutional intelligence.

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