Puneet Mehta, the CEO of AI customer service platform Netomi and a former Wall Street engineer and data scientist, said this week that the explosive growth of enterprise AI software will create a surge in demand for stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure. Mehta pegged the AI customer experience market alone at $5 trillion, arguing that the next wave of AI agents will need frictionless, programmable money to operate at scale.
Why AI agents need stablecoins
Mehta, who spent years building high-frequency trading systems on Wall Street before moving into artificial intelligence, sees a direct parallel between the speed requirements of financial markets and the needs of autonomous AI software. As companies deploy AI agents to handle customer service, payments, and supply-chain coordination, those agents will need to settle transactions quickly and programmatically.
“AI is going to exceed human capacity for handling high-volume, low-latency interactions,” Mehta said. “Stablecoins are tailor-made for that environment — they settle instantly, they're auditable, and they don't depend on traditional bank rails that weren't built for machine-to-machine payments.”
A $5 trillion customer-experience bet
Mehta's claim that the AI customer experience market is worth $5 trillion is not a prediction — it's an estimate of the total addressable market as companies rush to automate everything from tech support to sales follow-ups. Netomi itself builds conversational AI that handles customer tickets for brands like Instacart and HP, and Mehta said the shift toward autonomous agents is accelerating faster than most enterprises realize.
“Every one of those interactions, if it involves a payment, a refund, a subscription change, or a loyalty reward, becomes a transaction that could flow through a stablecoin,” he said. “That's where blockchain becomes the settlement layer for the AI economy.”
From Wall Street to crypto prediction
Mehta's background gives his comments weight in an industry that still struggles to separate genuine adoption signals from hype. Before founding Netomi, he built quantitative trading systems at Goldman Sachs and later led data-science teams at other Wall Street firms. He has also been an early advocate for blockchain technology, and his thesis about AI driving crypto demand has been consistent for years.
The timing of his latest statement also coincides with a broader push by enterprises to explore stablecoin payments for things like cross-border settlements and automated payroll for AI agents. While no major corporate deployments were announced alongside Mehta's remarks, the direction is clear: if AI agents are going to act on behalf of businesses, they need wallets and payment rails that work as fast as they do.
Whether the $5 trillion figure holds up is less important than the underlying logic. Stablecoins offer programmability, speed, and global reach — attributes that become more valuable as software stops being a tool and starts being a counterparty. Mehta argues that blockchain infrastructure will eventually become as essential to the AI stack as cloud computing is today.
