i2c CEO Says AI Agents Make Entire Workflows Disappear

The organizations scaling agentic AI successfully are building guardrails before they need them, i2c CEO Amir Wain writes in a new PYMNTS eBook, “Building the Agent-Ready Payments Enterprise.”

I think most companies building agentic AI are answering the wrong question. They ask which model to deploy. The harder question is whether the infrastructure underneath was ever designed to let something act on its own.

I’ve watched AI move through three eras: rule-based systems in the 1980s, machine learning that detected patterns starting around 2010, and now agentic AI — systems that reason, act autonomously, orchestrate across systems, and learn from every outcome. Generative AI gave us reasoning. Agentic AI adds perception, action and memory.

The companies winning in this era aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated artificial intelligence strategy. They’re the ones whose architecture was built to support it. An agent can only orchestrate across systems it can see and only act in real time if the underlying platform responds to events as they happen. When AI is layered onto fragmented systems and disconnected data, what looks like an AI initiative quickly becomes a data integration project.

We learned this through experience. Decisions we made years ago to build a unified data model across our platform are paying off in ways I didn’t fully anticipate. Our fraud systems can read signals across a customer’s entire relationship, not just a single transaction type, and learn continuously from outcomes. That foundation allows us to move decisions closer to the transaction itself.

The clearest example is fraud management. What once required an analyst review and a call-center process can increasingly be handled within the transaction flow. An anomaly is detected, action is initiated and the customer experience becomes a quick confirmation rather than an embarrassing decline or a lengthy dispute process. That’s not automating a step. It’s removing the step entirely.

As autonomy increases, decision rights shift. Judgments that once belonged to people increasingly belong to systems, with humans positioned to intervene rather than approve every action. Getting that balance right matters. Too much oversight limits the value of autonomy. Too little creates unnecessary risk.

That’s why governance becomes critical. Permissioning, audit trails and human oversight cannot be afterthoughts. The organizations scaling agentic AI successfully are building those guardrails before they need them, not after an incident exposes the gaps.

The build-versus-buy conversation is changing, too. Unless an organization operates at the scale of the largest players in its industry, building proprietary AI infrastructure from scratch is rarely the best use of capital or talent. The better question is which capabilities truly differentiate your business and which have already been solved well by trusted partners. Build where it creates competitive advantage. Partner where it doesn’t.

What hasn’t changed is the discipline required to evaluate any artificial intelligence use case: economic benefit, structured data, real scale and auditability. Agentic AI doesn’t lower that bar. It raises the stakes, because these systems aren’t just advising anymore. They’re acting.