MPE 2026: SoundCloud on the Payments Paradigm Shift Driven by LLMs and AI

At MPE 2026, David Ricart, Principal Product Manager on the Payments team at SoundCloud, discussed the evolutionary leap facing the payments sector. Ricart explained that his team is responsible for the full, end-to-end payment flow, managing everything from users purchasing services on the platform to paying out earnings to music creators.

SoundCloud pointed out that the widespread adoption of LLM and AI-based tools is a paradigm change, creating a massive opportunity to 10x their productivity. However, capitalizing on this opportunity requires flexibility and SoundCloud has observed that top-tier merchants are choosing to take ownership of the most critical business components of their payment stack.

This strategy allows them to quickly test, validate, and adapt to the ever-changing payment landscape and according to Ricart, companies that stick with rigid partners or inflexible infrastructure that cannot support this aggressive development speed risk being left behind.

The central topic of the event was agentic commerce, which SoundCloud believes the industry is rightly acknowledging as a reality. This shift will usher in a new era where “bots are going to be buying from bots” and interacting through fund transfers. 

This changes the way companies view automated transactions; historically, a bot at the checkout was seen as a bad sign, but the industry must now prepare for good bots making good purchases. The critical challenge is developing the ability to distinguish a legitimate, programmatic agentic purchase from a bad bot attempting to abuse the platform.

While the industry is acknowledging that agentic commerce is going to happen, Ricart stressed that there is no gold standard yet, and current solutions are fragmented. There is a expectation that card payments, which constitute the majority of transactions today, will be the default method for agentic commerce. However, Ricart personally believes that crypto is a “perfect use case” for agents and bots to conduct and operate transactions.