What is agentic commerce?
Agentic commerce is shopping done by an AI agent on a person’s instructions: the agent searches, compares, selects and pays, within limits the person set. It runs on existing payment rails, with two additions: proof that the agent is legitimate, and a signed mandate proving what the person authorized it to buy.
In detail
Agentic commerce is shopping done by an AI agent on a person’s instructions: the agent searches, compares, selects and pays, within limits the person set. It runs on existing payment rails, with two additions: proof that the agent is legitimate, and a signed mandate proving what the person authorized it to buy.
How it differs from e-commerce
In traditional e-commerce a human browses, fills a cart and clicks pay. In agentic commerce the human states an intent (“find white running shoes under $120 and buy them when in stock”), and an agent, in a chat assistant, a browser or a merchant app, does the rest. The agent needs three things today’s checkout does not provide: a way for the merchant to recognize it as a legitimate agent rather than a bot, a credential to pay without holding the person’s card, and a record of what it was allowed to buy.
Who is building the rails?
Visa Intelligent Commerce launched in 2025, and its Trusted Agent Protocol helps merchants tell malicious bots apart from legitimate AI agents. Mastercard Agent Pay, announced in April 2025, introduced Agentic Tokens for registered and verified agents. Stripe and OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, and Google’s AP2 is payment-method agnostic.
More detail in our #PayDecoding episode on Agentic commerce.