Agentic commerce: Where consumer intent meets merchant opportunity

The tech world is buzzing over the latest evolution of artificial intelligence: agentic commerce. It’s a phrase I’m hearing more often among payments professionals and ecommerce experts. I wanted to unpack what “agentic commerce” really means, why it's suddenly such a big deal, and how it can genuinely help your business.

In this article, I’ll go through some context around this smart new use of artificial intelligence, and go through practical steps to help you prepare.

What's agentic commerce, and why should you care?

Imagine this: you have a personal shopper on call, 24/7. This isn't just any shopper; it's one that truly gets your tastes, budget, and what you're looking for, right now. Forget endless scrolling. Through partnerships with leading conversational AI players like OpenAI and Microsoft, Mastercard and Visa are enhancing their existing payment capabilities to make shopping smoother and faster, thanks to AI.

At its heart, agentic commerce is about letting AI-powered digital agents shop on your behalf – just like a helpful companion that goes to the store and places the order for you. Instead of manually sifting through websites, comparing endless options, and navigating checkout mazes, these smart assistants handle the entire shopping process, from finding products to facilitating the payment. 

Put simply, it’s the next era of commerce: first, we had trading in person, next came shopping online (ecommerce), then on mobile (mcommerce), and now, via AI agent – will this be known as acommerce?

The promise of agentic commerce is to find exactly what you want, and pay for it in the same flow – making shopping feel effortless. Examples include Perplexity’s Buy with Pro, which allows you to compare and purchase products within a chat, and Amazon’s Buy for Me, which purchases a desired item from a retailer that’s not on Amazon (while you remain on the Amazon app). More recently, Google launched its AI Mode shopping experience which shows you exactly what you want to find, tracks the price, and lets you buy when the price seems right.

For your customers, this means shopping becomes incredibly convenient and deeply personal. This could be immensely disruptive for your business – with many opportunities to boost sales.

Agentic commerce will create a far more efficient shopping experience. But it's more than just a fancy new way to be lazy; it’s about personalization hitting a new level. With user permissions, AI can truly understand your preferences, buying history, and current context, so the recommendations it makes are spot on.

Example: An efficient shopping experience with agentic AI

For example, instead of losing an hour hunting for a Mother's Day gift, someone could just say to their AI: "Find a great gift for Mom, around $50, something she'd actually use and love." The AI would then dive into research, weigh the options. It can either ask for approval before making the payment or act upon prior instructions. It’ll even select a delivery option. With the right trust and security in place, people get back their time, and businesses can connect with customers at the exact moment they're ready to buy.

This new mode of shopping will streamline the stages of discovery and purchase, allowing us to skip some of these steps when we choose. It can be a real time-saver for those of us with busy lives. For businesses, it’s about being right where your customers are, with AI acting as a super-efficient matchmaker.

As agentic commerce catches on, the game changes. Businesses will need to make sure these AI agents can easily find and understand their products. This shift is as big as when ecommerce first landed or when mobile shopping took off: it’s going to fundamentally change how we buy and sell.

The new tech behind the upgrades 

As a software engineer at heart, I’m particularly passionate about the technology supporting such futuristic innovations. Two key tech themes are crucial here:

• Network tokenization: This means virtual card numbers are securely linked to real accounts and recognized as an agentic transaction when a purchase is being facilitated, giving everyone tight control and the ability to easily shut things down if needed. While we already have ways to replace payment data with a network token during a transaction request, the transformation here will be to add in an identifier so that it’s clear the agent is carrying out the transaction request.
• Authentication: Typically, this is the way in which the cardholder proves they are the person making the transaction. With AI agents able to make purchases on the customer’s behalf, we’ll need to craft new, robust ways of ensuring authentication. In line with FIDO standards, payments service providers can tap passkeys, biometrics, or device 2FA to verify the account holder truly gives permission for the purchase.

These examples aren't just theories, they show a real movement. For businesses, the message is clear: it's time to start thinking about how you'll fit into this AI-driven shopping world.

This might sound like something from the future, but it's already starting to take shape. Big players are building these capabilities right now, meaning widespread use is closer than we think:

• Mastercard: Agent Pay focuses on making AI-driven payments simple and secure by building upon tokenization technology that today powers and secures global commerce solutions like mobile contactless payments, secure card-on-file, and Mastercard Payment Passkeys, as well as programmable payments like recurring expenses and subscriptions. Through the introduction of Agentic Tokens, verified AI agents can complete purchases safely, following rules and preferences set by the consumer. This tech can carry out one-off payments, recurring expenses, subscriptions, and more, underpinned by verification and trust to protect merchants and consumers from bad actors from end-to-end.
• Visa: Intelligent Commerce is a suite of integrated APIs plus a commercial partner program that helps developers connect to consumers through AI. Their tokenization technology is framed as "AI-ready cards" with set spending limits and controls, leaning on solid security like FIDO and passkeys to ensure transactions are legit.
• Virtual Cards: Independently, virtual card solutions also play a key role. These digital-only cards can be instantly issued, managed, and configured by consumers or AI agents. They’re particularly suited to agentic commerce, offering precise controls on spending limits, usage restrictions, and merchant-specific permissions, enhancing security and consumer trust.

Why now? How technology is shifting the consumer towards agentic shopping

While many of us are used to AI answering questions, agentic commerce takes it further. These aren't just suggestion engines, they're AI agents that can recommend, act, and buy for us. Tomorrow’s AI isn’t just pointing to products, it takes care of the entire shopping trip. It feels like agentic commerce has arrived at just the right moment, thanks to a few key trends colliding:

1. The AI boom: Recent jumps in AI sophistication, such as generative AI and large language models (think ChatGPT), have been mind-blowing. AI now "gets" normal human language much better.  Everyday people are turning to AI as everyday search tools for shopping: one study found a 1200% increase in referral traffic to retail websites from AI assistants between 2024 and 2025.
2. The convenience craving: If there's one thing modern retail has taught us, it's that convenience is king. A whopping 71% of American shoppers point to it as their main reason for buying online. In a world where we expect things instantly, traditional ecommerce can feel like a chore, scrolling, comparing, entering payment details again. Agentic commerce delegates the work.
3. The interconnectivity of all apps: Mobile shopping is the default for many. It makes sense for shopping apps to connect to payment apps, which, in turn, connect to banking apps. And many shoppers now expect to buy through social media, too, with a 139% increase in the share of social media shopping as a proportion of all online commerce between 2020 and 2025. 

Agentic commerce is the next logical step in our daily digital interactions with AI – adding to the ecosystem of smart home assistants, auto-replenishing orders, and customer support via chatbot. If apps put shopping in our pockets, agentic commerce is the one-stop shop to find and pay for our next purchase. 

Creating payments policies around agentic commerce

Earning trust is critical in today’s digital economy – and even more so when it comes to adding payment technology which is so vastly different from what has gone before. When technology moves fast, it’s critical to take the time to bring your customers along the journey at their own pace. The work that bridges the gap involves new policy creation. 

Here are the key aspects of that:

Building trust

With such exciting new technology comes the need to show you’re using it responsibly. Your customers will have a long list of questions, so you should anticipate what these will be and how you will respond. In order to prepare your agentic commerce policies, consider every stage of the AI-supported buying process. In particular, you should think through ways to safeguard payment data, and ensure customers have an easy way to opt in or opt out. You may be able to cover lots of potential data security concerns using scheme-backed payment tokenization.

Authorization

Once customers believe in your ability to handle their data responsibly, you need to structure payment authorization permissions to support the agentic shopping journey. Protocols in this area are known as “Know Your Agent” (KYA), which is a framework not unlike Know Your Customer, ensuring AI agents are correctly identified at every stage of the payments chain. Such protocols will reduce the chances of fraud, and help to structure customer permissions while protecting sensitive payment data along the way.

Chargebacks

When customers raise a payment dispute via their chosen payment method, it can easily turn into a chargeback request. If you stack up too many of these, you’re looking at increased payment fees, possible card network penalties, and a downturn in customer satisfaction. Payments made by an AI agent must be clearly identified, with a tangible link to customer authorization for each payment, or general guardrails that incorporate that payment (for example, the customer’s authorization for spend through that agent up to a certain dollar amount within a given timeframe). 

Careful payments tracking will ensure you have a reliable way to challenge payment disputes on legitimate payments – the phenomenon of so-called “friendly fraud.”

Here are some more tips:

• Enhanced transaction details: Provide detailed, structured metadata for purchase identification by consumers and AI agents.
• Proactive consumer notifications: Send immediate alerts when transactions are initiated by AI agents to confirm intent and reduce misunderstandings.
• Streamlined refunds: Implement AI-compatible return and refund systems to simplify dispute resolution and discourage unnecessary chargebacks.

How to prepare for the age of agentic commerce

To really tap into what agentic commerce offers, you'll want to think strategically. Here’s how merchants can approach this.

You've generally got two ways to play:

1. The passive route: Let AI agents interact with your existing online store. For this, your main job is to keep your product information crystal clear, well-structured, and always up-to-date.
2. The active route: Go all in by integrating with platforms built for this (like Checkout.com’s upcoming Agentic Commerce API). These are designed for smooth, secure AI-driven sales.

No matter the path, consider these steps:

• Make your data AI-friendly: Can AI agents easily understand your product info and systems? Investing in good APIs, structured product feeds, and real-time inventory is key for quick, automated AI queries.
• Optimize for "AI SEO" (AEO): You want AI agents to recommend your products. This means rich product details, competitive pricing, and encouraging those good customer reviews. Think clear, structured information that lines up with what shoppers (and their AIs) will be looking for.
• Build trust (it's everything): Transparency is vital. Be upfront about how your AI interactions work, how they are verified, and how you're protecting user data. Use strong security like FIDO and let customers set their own spending limits. Show them the benefits (like easy reorders) while reassuring them about the safeguards.
• Upgrade your infrastructure: Make sure your systems (fraud detection, order management, customer service) can handle speedy, automated activity – particularly at the higher throughput which agentic shopping could unlock. 
• Stay compliant and ethical: Keep on top of data privacy laws (like GDPR or CCPA) and any new AI regulations. Being diligent here builds trust and protects your brand.
• Educate your customers: If you implement any AI, ensure you clearly inform your customers. Provide clear guides, demos, and responsive support, plus an updated policy clear ways to handle AI-related questions or returns. The more comfortable and in control they feel, the more likely they are to embrace it. Keep listening to feedback and tweaking the experience.

The future of payments with Checkout.com and agentic commerce

As I see it, agentic commerce is not just another trend; it's a fundamental shift in how we'll all be doing business, and I’m incredibly excited about the opportunities it brings. At Checkout.com, we're eager to explore the possibilities of this new technology for your business, and help you serve your customers even more effectively. 

Our payment experts can help you upgrade your payments infrastructure for enhanced customer engagement, increased sales, and reduced fraud. All of our technology is compliant with PCI DSS standards, and all other relevant financial regulations. That means you can partner with us on payments, no matter your capability for handling customer payment data. Our priority is to empower you with the technology and insights needed to thrive in the new era of AI-driven shopping. This is the future of commerce, and we're ready to help you succeed.