Agentic Commerce: Why payments, consent, and trust will define the next era of customer experience

From clicks to conversations - and now to delegation

For years, digital commerce has followed a familiar pattern. Consumers search, browse, compare, add to basket, and check out - click by click. Agentic commerce breaks this sequence. Instead of guiding users through interfaces, AI agents act on their behalf. They can anticipate needs, reason across options, and execute actions -sometimes completing purchases end to end with minimal human involvement. As discussed on the podcast:

For consumers, this promises convenience and speed. For merchants, it changes a more fundamental question: who is actually making the purchase?

Why agentic commerce is fundamentally different

AI recommendations and chatbots are not new. What is new is autonomy. Agentic systems can:

• Carry intent across channels

• Persist context over time

• Act without step by step human input

That autonomy is powerful but it also introduces new risks. Merchants must be able to answer questions that didn’t exist in traditional e commerce:

• Is this agent authorized to transact?

• Can customer consent be proven?

• Who carries liability if something goes wrong?

This is why agentic commerce is not just a UX shift—it is a trust shift.

The most complex part of the journey is the middle

Search and discovery are evolving rapidly, but their direction is relatively clear. Customer service is becoming conversational, predictable, and increasingly automated. The most complex- and least solved - part sits in between: the moment where intent turns into payment. This “middle” of the journey is where:

• Verification must happen

• Consent must be enforced

• Risk and liability must be managed

In agentic commerce, payments are no longer the final step. They become the mechanism that confirms authorization, legitimacy, and accountability.

Open ecosystems vs closed platforms

During the discussion, a key tension emerged: the rise of tightly controlled, closed agentic environments versus open, interoperable ecosystems. Closed systems can move fast, but they risk concentrating power and limiting merchant control. Open systems, built on shared protocols, allow:

• Merchants to retain ownership of customer relationships

• Branded agents powered by merchant data

• Transactions to happen across owned and non owned channels

For merchants of any size, interoperability is not a technical detail—it’s a strategic safeguard. It determines whether agentic commerce becomes a new form of dependency or a new source of differentiation.

Think in customer journeys, not technologies

One recurring theme from the conversation was the importance of starting with user journeys, not protocols. Agentic commerce works best when it is applied deliberately:

• Where does automation genuinely reduce friction?

• Which decisions can be delegated safely?

• Where should humans remain in control?

Merchants that approach agentic commerce as a set of isolated tools risk fragmented experiences. Those that design end to end journeys build confidence faster—both internally and with their customers.

A pragmatic path forward: crawl, walk, run

Fully autonomous commerce will arrive - but most merchants don’t need to start there. A phased approach allows progress without overexposure to risk.

1. Crawl: make commerce conversational internally

Start by making data and operations conversational. Enable internal teams to query transactions, handle refunds, or resolve issues using secure AI interfaces - while keeping permissions tight and auditable.

2. Walk: introduce low risk payment actions.

Extend conversational capabilities to controlled actions such as pay by link or refund initiation. This builds confidence and surfaces security requirements early.

3. Run: enable agent driven transactions

Once consent models, verification, and auditability are proven, merchants can open up to agent initiated payments - whether through their own agents or trusted third party agents. This staged approach gives merchants room to learn, adapt, and stay firmly in control.

Trust becomes the product

In traditional e commerce, trust was largely implicit. In agentic commerce, it must be explicit and provable. The ecosystem is converging around key building blocks:

• Intent mandates that define what an agent is allowed to do

• Cryptographic proof that a customer approved a transaction

• Agent verification (“know your agent”) to prevent fraud

• Audit trails that protect both merchants and consumers

As noted during the conversation:

In this world, payment infrastructure becomes the neutral trust layer that enables innovation without sacrificing accountability.

The human remains essential

Despite increasing automation, one point was clear across the panel: humans stay in the loop. Successful agentic systems:

• Allow merchants to define guardrails and thresholds

• Support smooth handoff from agent to human when needed

• Provide monitoring, quality metrics, and explainability

Agentic commerce is not about removing people from commerce—it’s about letting humans focus on judgment, oversight, and experience, while machines handle execution at scale.

What merchants should be doing now

Agentic commerce will not arrive everywhere at once. But merchants who wait for “full autonomy” before acting will miss the opportunity to shape how it works for them. Now is the time to:

• Ensure your products and services are discoverable in conversational journeys

• Lay foundations for consent, verification, and liability

• Choose open, interoperable partners and platforms

• Experiment safely within owned environments

• Treat trust as a competitive advantage - not a compliance checkbox

Agentic commerce may feel effortless to consumers. For merchants, success will depend on the systems - and the trust - built behind the scenes. Payments are where intent becomes real. And in agentic commerce, trust is what makes that possible.

If you want to listen to the full conversation, find the podcast here.