Digital marketing has evolved dramatically over the past decade, but one aspect has remained stubbornly manual: payments. While we’ve seen automations transform targeting, bidding, and optimization, the actual process of funding and executing media purchases still relies heavily on human intervention. This is beginning to change as agentic AI systems move beyond just analyzing and recommending and toward executing financial transactions.

This shift represents more than just operational efficiency, it's fundamentally changing how marketing teams approach budget allocation, campaign optimization, and real-time decision making in a complex digital advertising landscape.

The Current State of Marketing Payment Workflows

To understand why agentic payments matter, it's important to examine the limitations of current media buying and ad spend management approaches. Many marketing teams need to allocate budgets across multiple platforms and channels while optimizing performance as quickly as possible. Today, these teams often manage media and ad spend through a combination of manual processes and basic automation which are time consuming and limiting.

The limitations become more pronounced as marketing operations scale. A mid-sized company might manage hundreds of campaigns across dozens of platforms, each with different payment requirements, approval processes, and optimization needs.

Enter agentic AI. A swarm of AI agents can rapidly analyze target audience data, historical performance data, and estimated cost-per-click rates before deciding how to allocate your budget across various platforms against real-time pricing.

Beyond simple optimization, advanced agentic systems work in concert with advertising platforms that have built integrated payment capabilities. Demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) are increasingly developing infrastructure that allows AI agents to not only make bidding decisions but also handle the payment execution seamlessly. This creates a fully autonomous advertising ecosystem where agents can discover opportunities, evaluate inventory, negotiate rates, and complete transactions within defined parameters.

How Lithic is Helping Transform Marketing Operations

With Lithic, agents can generate virtual cards for each ad platform or each campaign with specific spending limits and authorization rules before executing media purchases autonomously. This enables real-time optimization of marketing performance while maintaining strict spending controls based on merchant, campaign budget, and other parameters.

How we’re seeing some of our marketing customers leverage Lithic to power their agentic media spend:

Why Legacy Processing Infrastructure Falls Short

Legacy card issuing infrastructure was designed for simple approve/decline logic with basic criteria. Most existing card issuer processors offer only basic spending controls and lack the sophisticated rule engines needed for complex marketing workflows where decisions must adapt based on performance data and market conditions. Additionally, many legacy systems process transactions in batches rather than real-time, introducing delays that negate the speed advantages agentic optimization is designed to provide.

What Makes Lithic Uniquely Well Suited  for Agentic Payments

Successfully implementing agentic payments for media spend critically hinges on first having in place payment infrastructure built specifically for autonomous, high-frequency transactions. The platform must handle instant provisioning of new cards, sophisticated authorization controls, and seamless integration with AI workflows while maintaining the security and compliance standards necessary for financial operations. While legacy infrastructure fails to deliver, these requirements are precisely what we designed Lithic's platform to solve at scale.

How Lithic Powers Agentic Media Buying

Lithic's modern platform eliminates these limitations. As a direct issuer processor to all three major card networks – Visa, Mastercard, and American Express – and purpose-built infrastructure for programmable payments, Lithic provides the performance and flexibility that agentic marketing requires. Our platform provides:

Security Architecture for Autonomous Systems

Marketing agents must operate within established regulatory frameworks while maintaining clear accountability. Lithic’s platform provides built-in security, control, and compliance capabilities specifically designed for delegated payment workflows. With Lithic, you get:

• Compliance controls that prevent AI agents from executing transactions outside of budgeted or regulatory boundaries
• Detailed audit trails that document AI decision patterns for performance and regulatory review
• Responsibility chains that connect automated transactions to verified campaigns and business entities

Additionally, Lithic employs secure communication protocols—such as HMAC-verified webhooks—that ensure AI-generated payment instructions maintain cryptographic integrity and prevent tampering or replay attacks.

Advanced Fraud Controls

Lithic’s Authorization Rules support customizable merchant restrictions, geographic controls, transaction limits, and risk-based approvals that adapt to campaign context and performance metrics. These precise controls are essential for maintaining control while unlocking the efficiency benefits of agentic media buying, and include:

• Merchant restrictions that limit AI purchasing to approved vendors only
• Fraud rules that align transactions with the explicit intent of the purchaser rather than the agent
• Geographic controls that prevent transactions in unauthorized regions
• Entry mode restrictions that control how an ad-buying agent can initiate transactions
• MCC rules that confine AI spending to relevant business categories
• Risk-based controls that can adapt authorizations based on transaction risk profiles

Real-Time Card Provisioning

Speed is a crucial element that separates the new agentic payments from traditional automation and processes, and is solved with Lithic’s real time card provisioning. This capability is especially important in the context of programmatic marketing, where opportunities often have extremely short windows, requiring payment infrastructure that can respond instantly to AI decision-making. When an agentic system identifies an optimal bidding opportunity or discovers underpriced inventory, it needs the ability to create and fund virtual cards in real-time rather than waiting for manual provisioning processes. This capability becomes even more critical as marketing programs scale across multiple platforms and geographic regions, where delays in payment setup can result in missed opportunities worth thousands of dollars.

Exception Handling & Chargeback Management

Even the most sophisticated AI systems will encounter exceptions that require resolution. Without effective exception handling, you would need to maintain parallel processes for these cases, likely undoing the efficiency upside of agentic payments. Lithic enables you to integrate exception handling directly into your media buying workflow, and automate the entire process. Programmatic dispute initiation can be triggered by AI systems automatically and Lithic provides structured evidence submission protocols that make it easy to file disputes.

The Path Forward

Agentic payments in marketing are still in their early stages; leading edge marketing organizations need robust payment infrastructure that can scale as their AI capabilities evolve. Success requires new operational frameworks, updated compliance and fraud processes, and payment infrastructure designed specifically for autonomous commerce.

With Lithic's modern platform, marketing teams can confidently embrace agentic payments, knowing their infrastructure can support both current needs and future innovations in AI-driven commerce. 

Interested in learning more? Lithic has partnered with Arcade to tackle one of the biggest hurdles in AI commerce: enabling agents to securely check out on behalf of users. Read the article here.

Ready to explore how agentic media buying can support your marketing teams? Book a time to connect with our team of experts.

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