One signal

AI’s consumer “killer app” may still be missing because the infrastructure and payment systems for agentic services have not caught up, argues an O’Reilly Radar essay published on 11 November.

The author compares today’s AI build-out with the early days of personal computing and the web: foundational tools first, familiar everyday uses later. It’s a useful framing for why capable models have not yet translated into must-have consumer services, though the excerpt offers an argument, not evidence that payment mechanisms are the decisive bottleneck.

Discuss: Are payment systems the main thing holding back useful AI agents, or is the bigger problem that they still do too little reliably?

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