Agentic commerce: when an AI agent shops and pays

A chatbot recommends a product. An agent moves the purchase forward: it reads the product data, builds a cart, asks for a quote and submits the order. IBM describes tiered autonomy, where low-risk purchases run on their own and expensive ones wait for the customer's approval. The payment uses a credential the customer authorized in advance, such as a card token issued for the agent.

Several open protocols cover the merchant side. The Agentic Commerce Protocol of OpenAI and Stripe handles product access, cart, checkout and order updates. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, built with Shopify, connects agents to retail systems, and Google's Agent Payments Protocol records the customer's consent in signed mandates. Stripe's shared payment tokens let an agent use a customer's saved payment method without exposing the credentials. A token can be limited to one seller, an amount and a time window.

The card schemes run their first live programs in Europe. Banco Santander and Mastercard completed what they call Europe's first live end-to-end payment executed by an AI agent with Mastercard Agent Pay, inside Santander's regulated payment framework and within limits the customer set. Visa announced at its Payments Forum in Paris that 31 issuing banks in its Agentic Ready program let AI agents buy at merchants such as lastminute.com and Frasers. The list includes Commerzbank, comdirect and Deutsche Kreditbank from Germany, ING, Nordea, Revolut and the Sparkassen card company S-Payment.

Every transaction in Visa's program was confirmed with a Visa Payment Passkey, which Visa links to strong customer authentication under European rules. Merchants recognize the agent through the Trusted Agent Protocol, which Cloudflare and Akamai build into their networks.

Card rules assume a person at the checkout. With an agent, the issuer needs proof of what the customer allowed, and the merchant needs to know which agent placed the order. Know your agent checks and the signed mandates of AP2 answer these two points today; chargeback rules for a purchase the agent got wrong are still open.

Merchants face a data question. Shopify's guide to agentic commerce tells sellers to publish complete, machine-readable product data and plain-language return policies, because an agent compares offers on what it can parse. The seller remains responsible for fulfillment, refunds and customer service in Stripe's embedded checkout model. An agent does not change who the payer is. Payment teams also need to check their obligations under PSD2 and changes to the rules through PSD3.

Agentic commerce is commerce in which AI agents find, choose and pay for goods or services on behalf of a consumer or a business. The customer sets the goal and the limits; the agent carries out the purchase and pays with a credential the customer authorized.

Agentic commerce is the whole purchase, from product search to delivery. Agentic payments are the payment step inside it: the mandate, the authentication and the liability when an agent initiates a transfer or a card payment.

Visa names Commerzbank, comdirect and Deutsche Kreditbank among the issuers in its European Agentic Ready program, and S-Payment, the card company of the Sparkassen, is on the same list.