Emerging AI Trends with USDC
Speaker
Corey Cooper is a technologist with experience spanning development, founding and scaling products, solutions engineering, and developer relations. He blends vision, creativity, and strong business acumen with deep technical expertise to drive go-lives, product launches, and high-impact developer experiences. Corey is known for his ability to navigate across roles, lead cross-functional initiatives, and deliver scalable, well-crafted solutions that support both product growth and customer success.
SUMMARY
In this episode of Stablecoin 101, Corey Cooper from the Developer Relations team explains how blockchain and AI work hand in hand to unlock new use cases for programmable money.
What you’ll learn:
- Why blockchain is uniquely suited as a trust and settlement layer for AI
- A demo of an AI agent making autonomous USDC micro-payments for API access
- Emerging agent-to-agent payment models powered by stablecoins
TRANSCRIPT
Earlier in this series, we discussed common payment use cases where USDC shined, like cross border payments, remittances, and peer to peer payments. With the emergence of AI, developers have started building agents that can automate payments or transfers using USDC. Let's talk about how this can be useful. Hi.
I'm Corey, and I work on the developer relations team here at Circle. Welcome back to our Stablecoin one zero one series where we break down the foundations of stablecoins and how they are powering the new Internet financial system. As it turns out, blockchain and AI go hand in hand, and understanding how they work together is critical to automating payments with USDC. For one, the blockchain solves key problems for AgenTik AI.
It offers guaranteed, verified, near instant settlement, no chargebacks, always on, verifiable compute, and most importantly, it enables programmatic access to value. That unique combination makes it uniquely suited for trust minimized financial interactions. When incorporating AI, some of the use cases that are emerging include sending and receiving money, purchasing items online, trading, and buying cryptocurrencies. When you combine an agent's ability to programmatically carry out a task or programmable money, you unlock an entirely new category of commerce, and that's a big deal.
To demonstrate this, we recently built a sample app that shows what it looks like in action. Let's take a closer look. In our demo, the AI agent autonomously accesses payroll resources by spending USDC without requiring human approval for each transaction.
When the agent encounters a restrictive API, it independently evaluates the cost and initiates a micropayment to unlock access.
This highlights a key step towards self sufficient AI systems where agents can interact with paid services on demand using stablecoins to navigate digital environments without manual intervention. And that's just one of many new paradigms. We're now seeing the rise of agent to agent payments, where machines pay other machines. New monetization models are emerging where agents accept USDC for access to hosted compute like MCP servers, micropayments for individual inference tasks, API usage fees, access tokens, and event based triggers.
Instead of subscriptions or credit cards, we now have autonomous software that earns and spends in real time powered by USDC. Programmable dollars give agents the ability to act on intent.
That means fully automated, trust minimized, global transactions can settle in seconds. This unlocks a future where not only users, but their agents become active participants in digital economies. Sit with that for a second. USDC is becoming the native money for AI workflows to help build an Internet of value where money can move freely and seamlessly throughout the world.
See you in the next video.
