ACI Worldwide: How AI is Enhancing Payments Infrastructure

Agentic commerce – where AI functions as both buyer and adviser – could be emerging as a disruptive force within the fintech sector.

The phenomenon was explored by Philip Bruno, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at ACI Worldwide, at the recent MIT Sloan Fintech Conference. Speaking alongside peers from Synchrony, NVIDIA, PwC and Airwallex, Philip outlined what commerce might look like when AI begins making purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers.

The development suggests digital ecosystems will evolve as AI agents initiate discovery, comparison and purchasing autonomously – a topic that blends the sophistication of modern payments orchestration with the next wave of consumer empowerment, as well as risk.

"As AI becomes an active participant in commerce, the winners will be the companies that embed secure, intelligent wallet experiences directly into the merchant journey," Philip told the conference.

"Agentic systems only work when three things can be guaranteed: permission that can be verified, identity that persists across the entire transaction and evidence that ensures a fair outcome when something goes wrong."

The role of trust

For ACI Worldwide – which provides intelligent payments orchestration for banks, billers and merchants – the positioning of agentic commerce could represent more than an academic discussion. The company views agentic commerce as a natural evolution of its core mission to make digital payments both secure and seamless.

Philip's central thesis – that systems enforcing trust will define competitive advantage – addresses one of the most complex challenges in AI-driven transactions: accountability.

According to Philip, a clear important step is to separate hype from current reality when it comes to agentic commerce. Among the trends already gaining traction are zero-click purchasing, interoperable wallet protocols and early agent-driven shopping flows.

However, as Philip and peers emphasised, not all autonomous commerce innovations could be equally promising. Much-touted standalone bots, voice-only assistants and isolated consumer agents, for example, have delivered limited practical results.

ACI Worldwide claims that the next phase will focus on control.

Infrastructure remains deterministic

Philip's remarks at MIT build on research from ACI showing that, while AI can transform workflows and customer engagement, payments infrastructure remains inherently deterministic and therefore reliable.

A company statement says his perspective "builds on ACI’s recent work showing that while workflow‑based applications may be disrupted by Gen AI, deterministic payments infrastructure is strengthened, not replaced, by agentic technologies". 

According to ACI Worldwide, AI enhances trust, fraud detection, exception handling and transaction intelligence, but the underlying rules-based systems remain essential for compliance, auditability and safety.

This suggests that rather than replacing existing infrastructure, AI could augment and strengthen the foundational systems that underpin global payments.

About Philip Bruno

Philip joined ACI Worldwide in January 2025 after three decades at McKinsey & Company. This experience allows him to bring a broad view of the financial ecosystem to ACI Worldwide.

As a former co-lead of McKinsey's Global Payments Practice, he advised financial institutions during several waves of digital and cloud transformation.

Now, at ACI Worldwide, his mandate is to translate those insights into growth opportunities built on resilient global infrastructure. ACI Worldwide handles 11% of global card transactions.

Philip's mandate is to accelerate revenue by embedding the real-time payments platform into AI ecosystems, ensuring interoperable digital wallets and deterministic infrastructure scale with generative AI.