AI continues to take the world by storm. It’s hard to go a day without grappling with the newest major breakthrough, as everything from cars to customer service gets automated. It’s even harder to figure out what it means for our industry. One thing is certain: major changes are already underway, and tomorrow’s payment space will be completely transformed by AI-driven solutions.
To keep our community informed, and for our own research, we’ve used this blog for years to cover the newest tech and how COCARD is integrating it into our POS suite. So far, we’ve stayed ahead and have been rewarded with massive growth.
The next wave of new technology may prove the largest yet, with huge benefits for those who adopt it early. Agentic AI is coming fast, so let’s talk about it.
Agentic AI: Your Computer Gets a Computer
Interest in agentic AI has surged this summer
Source: Google Trends
If you’re working in or near the AI space, you have probably heard the word “agentic” thrown around a lot this summer. It became a buzzword as major LLM’s (chatbots like ChatGPT or Grok) started getting agentic capabilities.
COCARD has stayed plugged into how AI is transforming our industry, but like the rest of the tech world, the speed of this newest innovation took us by surprise. Agentic AI will massively accelerate how people transact and the extent to which robots are actually doing their shopping, traveling, authenticating, and planning for them.
As NVIDIA explains, “AI chatbots (like ChatGPT) use generative AI to provide responses based on a single interaction. A person makes a query, and the chatbot uses natural language processing to reply.” It’s very good at generating text or images, but not much else. Agentic AI, on the other hand, lets robots do a lot more.
When fully polished, your agentic assistant can do just about anything that you could do from a computer. It has a virtual desktop just like yours, with all the apps that a super-assistant might need, from excel to a web browser to PowerPoint to programming applications like Python. It can make payments for you, integrate with your calendar, plan your trips, and make reservations.
If you pair this capability with the voice and reasoning power that the best language models already have, you get a dynamic resource for any job that can be done with a phone and a computer. Soon, agentic AI will back up humans in tech support, customer service, marketing, copywriting, web design, accounting, and much more.
Predicting the Agentic Impact on the POS Industry
Here are some of our major service areas that agentic AI is transforming in the next couple of years, according to experts:
Customer Service:
I remember when voice-recognition phone bots first came out: I couldn’t yell “Speak to a Representative!” fast enough. I just wanted to skip to a person, rather than yelling the same word, only to be met with “I didn’t quite catch that”. This is not what the tech looks like today, and definitely not a couple of years down the line.
Tomorrow’s customer service bots, based on agentic AI, will have their own virtual computers to support you from. Agentic bots will not only have the advanced language capability that we see today, but they’ll have a fully functional computer to use when supporting you.
In fact, CISCO expects that “by 2028, 68% of all customer service and support interactions with technology vendors are expected to be handled by agentic AI.” That means massive efficiency gains and major competitive advantages for tech providers who integrate these solutions early.
Payments
We’re entering a new era in transactions, and we have to be ready for it. Visa is rolling out support for purchases made by AI agents on behalf of their human users.
The company envisions a near-future in which you can tell your agent, “Plan a trip to Florida for these dates and this budget, including flights and the hotel”, and the agent will be fully authorized to make reservations and purchases on your behalf.
That vision requires major trust verification procedures, and Visa is working with tech firms like Amazon and OpenAI to realize this vision. COCARD will be monitoring their progress closely and will make sure our merchants are empowered to accommodate demand from agentic buyers.
Sales-Not So Fast!
Agentic AI will make our member-owners’ lives easier by helping them schedule meetings, support their clients, and streamline workflow across the board. At the end of the day, though, humans make sales and nurture relationships, not robots.
Our commitment is to empower our member-owners with the best technology as it rolls out, to maximize their competitive advantage and the value of our services. Agentic AI will help our members focus on what they do best: create and maintain loyal, valuable relationships.
COCARD: Staying Ahead of a Fast-Moving Future
Since our inception near the new millennium, we’ve built a leading company by leaning into the Digital Age. We know that change can be overwhelming, and it seems to only get faster with time. Our commitment, and our great success so far, is to make sure that our members and merchants are empowered by this change, not burdened by it.
Agentic AI, and whatever tomorrow brings, will promise disruption and huge gains in efficiency, cost, and customer experience. Let’s make sure we’re on the winning side of history.
Whether a potential member or merchant, get in touch today!