Jan Čurn: how Apify taught AI agents to pay for themselves

Czech tech company Apify has become one of the first in the world to let AI agents choose and pay for the tools they need to do their job — entirely without human involvement. So says Apify co-founder Jan Čurn, whose company already gives robots access to more than 20,000 services on its online marketplace.

The idea is simple: when an AI needs third-party software to complete a complex task — say, to scrape data in bulk or track competitors' prices — instead of pausing to ask a human to pay for something, the AI agent goes straight to the Apify marketplace, picks the tool it needs and pays for it instantly. The user never has to sign up or enter card details.

What makes this possible is the x402 payment protocol, overseen by the Linux Foundation and originally developed by the crypto exchange Coinbase. According to Čurn, if AI agents are to work truly autonomously, they need their own secure way to pay — without access to a person's bank card or account.

In practice, it works like this: the user sets up a crypto wallet for their AI bot, tops it up via a QR code, and gives the agent access to make its own purchases. Čurn explains why ordinary cards won't do: a fee of around three percent plus a flat charge, often about 50 cents, makes no sense for micropayments of just a few cents — for a weather query, say, or niche data. Crypto payments, on the other hand, are technically capable of handling such tiny sums.

For now, AI payments are mostly confined to software and digital services, but Čurn expects them gradually to spread into everyday life too — from automatic grocery shopping and booking accommodation to corporate orders for materials. He says almost every major player in the payments market — Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and PayPal — has rolled out its own solution for autonomous AI payments over the past year, although the total volume of transactions on protocols like x402 is still only around a million dollars a month.

Čurn is convinced that interest in “agentic” payments will grow as users' trust in AI assistants grows. As an example, he points to the Czech company Rohlík, which recently launched its own MCP server — an interface for connecting to chatbots such as ChatGPT. Today you can already ask an agent to fill your shopping basket; all that's missing is the final step — the payment itself, which AI will soon be able to handle on its own.