In a new PYMNTS eBook, “Building the Agent-Ready Payments Enterprise,” Volante Technologies Chief Product, Engineering and Delivery Officer Deepak Gupta writes that the next phase of agentic AI in payments will be defined by which banks can prove what their agents did, rather than by agent capabilities. The practical question guiding development of Volante’s agentic AI solution, Vol360i, is “How much work can agents take on without weakening control?” Banks need agents that can work within the payment flow, act when evidence is strong, escalate when risk is higher and show how each recommendation was made. As inference costs fall, the binding constraint shifts from compute to control, making a confidence-based operating model a rational choice. Vol360i is built around four capabilities: Sense Agents monitor for risks, Predict Agents determine the best outcome for each payment, Prevent Agents identify potential failures, and Repair Agents resolve payment issues in real time. These capabilities move banks away from static rules and manual queues and prepare them for a growing share of payments initiated by agents acting on behalf of humans. The financial institution that can govern agent-initiated payments—verifying intent, scoring confidence and escalating anomalies—will strengthen its competitive advantage as the counterparty becomes non-human. Governance must shape how agents are designed, tested and monitored from the start.