paidbyagent.com
Independent, vendor-neutral advisory on agentic payments and commerce for payments companies, merchants, API providers, AI platforms, and investors.
Zdeněk "Z" Němec
Founder, paidbyagent.com · Agentic payments & commerce advisory · ex-Apiary, Superface
Bio
About
I build interface and execution architecture for the next generation of software: from machine-readable API contracts, through autonomous integration and contracting, to AI-consumable capability systems and agent-native execution.
Professional biography
Zdeněk Němec is a software architect, founder, and researcher focused on the evolution of software interfaces toward autonomous contracting and agent-native systems, with a current focus on agentic payments and commerce.
He runs paidbyagent.com, an independent, vendor-neutral advisory on agentic payments and commerce. He helps payments companies, merchants, API providers, AI platforms, and investors understand how AI agents discover, decide, authorize, and transact — and what that means for their strategy, infrastructure, and protocol choices across UCP, AP2, x402, MPP, and the trust layer beneath them.
Before that, he spent 15 years on machine-readable interfaces. At Apiary, he created API Blueprint and helped define API-first design; Oracle acquired the company in 2017. He founded Good API, advising Adidas, DHL Group, Inditex, and VW Group on their API programs. Superface (2020–2026) pursued autonomous API integration and, toward the end, agentic payments.
His work spans multiple architectural transitions, including:
- Agentic B2B, payments, and commerce
- agent-native execution infrastructure
- autonomous contracting and settlement
- AI-consumable capability systems
- integration abstraction layers
- autonomous APIs
- APIs as products
- contract-driven API development
He has spoken at international conferences including O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference, Nordic APIs, APIdays, GitHub Satellite, and AI The Docs.
Career timeline
Superface.ai
Built capability infrastructure for autonomous integration, contracting, and agentic business systems.
Good API
Independent consulting on API architecture and platform design, advising Adidas, DHL Group, Inditex, and VW Group.
Apiary
Creator of the API Blueprint description language; acquired by Oracle in 2017.
Research
How the work has evolved
From machine-readable API contracts through autonomous integration, capability abstraction, autonomous contracting, AI agents, and Agentic B2B, the work follows a sustained shift toward autonomous business systems.