The European Central Bank has invited payment companies, fintechs and other European organizations to explore how artificial-intelligence agents, micropayments and machine-to-machine transactions could interact with a potential digital euro.
The initiative is an early-stage design exercise rather than a product launch or technical trial of agent-controlled payments. The AI work will take place through topic-specific workshops at the ECB in the first and second quarters of 2027. The central bank said the sessions are intended to examine new payment use cases and their implications for the future design of the digital euro.
Exploration, not an AI payment rollout
The AI focus is one part of a broader call for expressions of interest dated September 28. The ECB is seeking participants with expertise in AI-enabled payment experiences, autonomous agents, small-value payments, machine-to-machine interactions and user-facing payment features. Payment service providers, technical service providers, merchants, consumer groups, academic institutions and fintech companies are among the target participants.
Applicants are expected to explain how their proposed concepts align with digital euro principles including privacy, trust, user control and data protection. However, the ECB expressly places cybersecurity, fraud prevention, compliance, risk management and other internal operational processes outside the scope of this workshop track. That boundary matters for payments companies: the program may help shape use cases and design questions, but it will not by itself resolve the control, liability and authentication issues required for an AI agent to transact in production.
A subset of applicants will be selected to present at the workshops, while others may attend and contribute to discussions. The ECB may later publish summaries or reports based on the work.
A separate track will build prototypes
The same call includes an experimentation workstream scheduled to run from January through June 2027. Participants in that track will develop proofs of concept or prototypes around electronic receipts, transactions involving multiple payers or payees, conditional payments and front-end features.
The distinction between the two tracks is important. Hands-on participants will receive specifications and requirements for connecting to a dedicated test environment, but the initial scope is limited to simulated payment providers interacting with the digital euro back end. It does not cover complete end-to-end transaction flows across multiple participants. AI agents and machine-to-machine payments, meanwhile, are listed under the workshop-based exploration track rather than among the technical experimentation topics.
The conditional-payment work will examine transactions that execute when predefined conditions are met. The ECB distinguishes that model from programmable money, in which the use of the money itself is restricted by purpose, place, time or counterparty.
What payment providers should watch
For the payments industry, the call gives providers an opportunity to influence where value-added services may sit around a public digital payment rail. Questions around agent authorization, transaction limits, consent, dispute handling and interoperability remain outside the published scope or unresolved. Those operational layers would need clearer treatment before exploratory concepts could become deployable payment services.
Applications are open to legally established organizations in the European Union and close at 17:00 CET on November 9, 2026. Participation is voluntary and unpaid. The ECB plans to publish the selected participants in January 2027.
This innovation program is also separate from the ECB’s 12-month digital euro pilot due to begin in the second half of 2027. The central bank selected 36 payment service providers for that exercise in July. The pilot will use a beta digital euro without legal tender status to test payment functionality, operational processes and user experience. Neither the pilot nor the new innovation call constitutes a decision to issue a digital euro.