Spend management for AI agents
Set budgets, choose who agents can pay, and decide when they need approval.
Choose a budget owner, distinguish hard limits from approval thresholds, and account for repeated payments.
What spend management for AI agents means
Spend management sets an agent’s budget, approved recipients, and approval requirements. The person or team funding the agent owns those rules.
A prompt cannot enforce a budget. The connected payment system must check the rules and follow the decision before sending money.
Why it is not the same as expense management
Expense reports explain past spending. Employee cards can also enforce limits before a purchase; agents need checks on the payments they choose during a task.
Set a budget for the task as well as each payment. Several individually allowed requests can still exceed the total budget.
The rules to set before an agent spends
Rules apply together. A hard limit blocks a request; an approval threshold holds it for review without overriding the hard limit.
Conto supports stablecoin payments, including API payments using protocols such as x402.
Five requests, one policy
A procurement agent has a $200 daily budget, a $50 line above which a person has to approve, a $150 hard cap per payment, and three approved data vendors.
$18 to vendor A clears. $75 to vendor A is held until a person approves it. $18 to a vendor not on the list stops. $160 to vendor A stops too, and nobody is asked, because it's over the hard cap. Late in the day, with $190 already spent, a $25 request to vendor A stops as well: the daily budget has $10 left.
Each answer is stored with the request that produced it: the amount, the recipient, the rule that fired, and who approved the exception if anyone did.
Where the spend decision happens
The agent requests a payment, Conto checks it against policy, routes exceptions to a person, and records the decision. The payment then settles on whatever rail the agent's wallet uses.
Conto decides, the wallet sends · Conto holds the rules and the record
Agent requests a payment
POST /payments/requestConto checks owner policy
Owner’s approver decides
Routine spend skips this step.
Buyer wallet sends funds
Once the request clears, the managed wallet signs and sends. Conto holds the decision and the record.
POST /payments/:id/executeLogged with full context
tx 0x9f2c… ✓
policy · approval · settled
Agent keeps its own keys · Conto authorizes, logs on confirm
Agent asks to authorize
POST /payments/approveConto checks owner policy
Owner’s approver decides
Routine spend skips this step.
Buyer’s signer sends
Conto returns a 10-minute approval. The agent sends the transaction.
Agent reports the transaction ID
POST /payments/:id/confirmtx 0x9f2c… ✓
policy · approval · settled
Same payment context, same policy evaluation, same audit trail. Who signs and sends is where the path diverges.
Where Conto fits
Conto checks requests through its policy engine before payment. Your payment tools must require authorization before signing; an unrestricted signer can bypass the check.
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from setting a budget in the prompt?
A budget in a prompt is a suggestion the agent can ignore or miscalculate. The connected payment system must require authorization before sending; a check the agent can bypass is not enforcement.
What happens when an agent hits its daily cap halfway through a task?
The request that would cross the cap stops, and the agent gets a denial it can act on: finish with what it already bought, wait for the budget to reset, or ask a person to raise the limit. If a task can't be left half done, set the approval threshold below the cap so the last few payments are held for a person instead of denied.
Who should own the limits, engineering or finance?
Finance owns the numbers and the recipient list, because those are budget decisions. Engineering owns where the check runs, because a limit only holds if it sits in the payment path. Keep the policy somewhere both teams can read it and change it, with a record of who changed what.
Do limits still apply when the agent pays from its own wallet?
Yes, as long as the agent asks for a decision first and reports the result back afterward. The check is the same. The difference is that the agent's wallet signs the payment instead of a managed one. If the agent can skip the ask, the limit is a suggestion again.
Related Conto resources
Test a spending limit
Choose the agent, its budget, the recipients it can pay, and the threshold that routes a payment to a person. Watch the policy check run in the sandbox before you go live.
How to control AI agent spending