Circle: Agentic's Uber moment hasn't arrived, yet

• Key insights: Circle has built a suite of agentic AI tools. 
• What's at stake: Payment companies and banks are all pursuing the technology, which has still not developed a mainstream market but has lots of promise. 
• Expert quote: "That demand isn't here today but we are anticipating it, just like it was hard to see how the internet would lead to businesses like Facebook and Uber," Circle's Jeremy Fox-Geen said. 

Circle's Jeremy Fox-Geen says he doesn't know what agentic commerce has in store, and he's totally OK with that.
"A lot of people are conceptualizing the idea of an AI agent to research travel and then buy a ticket for me. What's much harder to imagine is a world where agents and software are building non-payment uses that open up new areas for payments," Fox-Geen, Circle's chief financial officer, told American Banker.

Circle has developed a broad set of tools designed for agentic commerce, anticipating developers will want to pair agentic AI with other business concepts, and ultimately need a rail to process payments. Circle, which is best known as the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, is not alone in taking a "Field of Dreams" approach to agentic commerce. Dozens of banks, big technology firms and payment companies are collectively pouring billions of dollars into technology that's still largely experimental and looking for use cases.

"That demand isn't here today but we are anticipating it, just like it was hard to see how the internet would lead to businesses like Facebook and Uber," Fox-Geen said. 

What Circle is doing

Circle contends that as AI agents embed deeper into the economy, demand will accelerate for a financial infrastructure that can manage a heightened need for speedier processing, interoperability and cost-effectiveness. 

As luck would have it, stablecoins and blockchain-powered technology can provide this, according to Circle.  

"We're building for a world where software orchestrates economic activity," Fox-Geen said. 

Circle's agent tools include Circle CLI, a command interface that lets developers and potentially AI agents build applications on top of Circle's platform suite, with a focus on wallets, payments and policy management for agents. The other products include: Nanopayments, a protocol that supports USDC transfers designed for large volumes of machine-to-machine payments; Agent Wallets, which are designed for AI agents to hold, send, and manage funds autonomously within predefined guardrails; and Agent Marketplace, a directory of agentic services that both humans and AI agents can browse and integrate to enable agents to discover and pay for services programmatically.

Much like the internet opened new forms of commerce, Fox-Geen says the intersection of distributed ledgers, digital assets and agentic AI will fuel businesses that don't yet exist. 

"At this point, agentic payments is more of a roadmap issue. Companies in the space need to be able to explain how they think programmable payments might work, even if the market is still early," James Wester, a director at Javelin Strategy & Payments, told American Banker. "The near-term impact is probably limited, but it is still a useful way to think about why stablecoins may matter in agentic commerce."

If agents are going to hold value and initiate payments, they will need payment tools that are programmable, available in real time, while also being constrained by clear rules, Wester said. "That last part will be the hard part. The payment itself is not especially interesting. The question is who authorized the agent, how much it can spend, where it can spend, what compliance checks apply, and who is responsible when something goes wrong."

Circle's Arc

Circle has spent much of the past two years stacking payment services that use stablecoins or the underlying technology that supports digital assets. 

The company in 2025 launched the Circle Payments Network, which connects financial institutions, digital wallets, and payment companies to process instant payments across different currencies, enrolling more than 55 financial institutions by early 2026. 

Circle's recently launched Arc Blockchain is designed for stablecoin-native applications like tokenization and foreign exchange. Arc features sub-second finality and allows transaction fees to be paid directly in USDC to eliminate fee volatility.

The payment company has integrated this technology with major financial technology players, including FIS and Finastra, to enable thousands of traditional banks to offer USDC payments to their customers. It also partnered with Stripe and Visa to scale stablecoin usage in mainstream commerce.

As smart contracts and other forms of "programmable money" advance, so will the adjacent use cases, Fox-Geen contends. "AI agents will perform the software orchestration," Fox-Geen said. "We're just starting to see this happening." 

Circle is in many respects building a global stablecoin movement network analogous to Visa in traditional currency, according to analysts at William Blair. "Combined with proliferating like agentic and managed payments, the power of Circle's vertically integrated offerings is coming into focus," William Blair analysts said. "Circle will generate high-margin revenue tied to Arc transactions, which will reinforce Arc's security and offer a window into monetization."