The crypto industry’s embrace of AI is less about chatbots and more about building financial infrastructure for autonomous machines, says Chappy Asel, a former Apple engineer and founder of AI nonprofit The AI Collective.

Speaking at Consensus Miami, Asel, founder of The AI Collective, a global nonprofit AI community with more than 200,000 members across 150+ chapters, argued that as software agents increasingly make economic decisions on behalf of users and businesses, they will need payment systems capable of handling low-latency, programmable transactions at scale.

“When agents make the majority of financial decisions, economic decisions, how do they transact with each other?” Asel said during the panel. “You want them to be…