Houston AITX Community Monthly Meetup: Teaching agents to pay
Join the Houston chapter of AITX Community for an evening of hands-on collaboration, knowledge sharing, and community building.
Agenda
45 min – NetworkingMingle with local AI enthusiasts, exchange business cards, and discover potential collaborators.
10 min – Opening RemarksWelcome from the Houston AITX chapter lead, overview of upcoming events, and community announcements.
60 min – Workshop + Interactive DemoWe will have someone presenting a workshop on AI workflows and tools they use to the group. After the presentation we will move into interactive learning where attendees will work with the presenter to build out some ideas in real time.
This is not Austin 2.0—Houston’s scene is unique, and you have the power to help shape an AITX chapter that reflects the city’s distinct mix of industries, institutions, and talent.
This Month's Workshop: Teaching agents to pay with Apify
Your agent can call any free endpoint you point it at. The moment that endpoint costs money, it stops. It can't enter a card, approve a subscription, or agree to a rate, so the workaround is always the same: you, in the loop, pasting in an API key.
This month we take you out of that loop. You'll watch an agent hit a paid endpoint, get a 402 back with the price attached, pay it, and retry - no human, no subscription, no key. Then you'll run the same flow yourself against a real paid Actor on the Apify platform.
This is the session Apify brought to the RenderATL AI Summit in Atlanta earlier this month, the only talk there on agentic payments, rebuilt so you leave having actually done it rather than having watched it.
If you're building agents that need data they don't own, you'll see what the payment layer looks like when it isn't a human with a credit card. If you publish tools, you'll see the other side of it: what it takes to charge an agent directly, per run, with no account and no signup.
This Month’s Venue: POST Houston
POST Houston is an entertainment venue in Downtown Houston, Texas, United States which was formerly a major regional post office known as Houston Downtown Post Office. The sorting facility was renamed to honor Barbara Jordan. The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. From 1887, the area had been developed as Grand Central Station for the Houston and Texas Central Railroad.
Here’s the specific room - Suite 1420 - that we’ll be using for the meetup: