What is a financial control plane for AI agents?

A financial control plane gives autonomous software economic context: who the agent belongs to, what it may spend, when a human must intervene, what actually settled and whether the action created value.

The practical model

• Identity answers who is acting.
• Delegated policy answers what the agent may do.
• Approval handles exceptions.
• Ledger preserves the economic trace.
• ROI connects spend to business value.

How Alem approaches it

Alem implements this as company workspace → agent identity → policy → approval → ledger → settlement record → outcome → ROI. Payment rails sit beneath this layer.

What is live today

Alem's sandbox includes company workspaces, agent registry, budgets, spend policies, human approvals, economic ledger, ROI, HTTP/OpenAPI and MCP. Live payment execution remains private beta / integration-stage.