By Sharon Gai
As AI agents evolve from answering questions to executing transactions, a new commercial paradigm is taking shape. Agentic commerce, where autonomous software researches, negotiates, purchases, and pays on behalf of humans and businesses, will reshape how companies sell, how consumers buy, and how global business leaders must rethink their competitive strategies in the years ahead.
In May 2025, Visa made an announcement that most business leaders overlooked but that may prove to be one of the most consequential developments in modern commerce. The company revealed Visa Intelligent Commerce, a product that embeds the Visa payment protocol directly inside large language models. The implications are profound: your AI assistant can now research a product, compare options, and complete a purchase, all within a single conversation. No browser tabs. No checkout page. No cart abandonment.
Shortly after, Perplexity announced its partnership with Venmo and PayPal to enable transactions within its own AI platform. These were not isolated experiments. They were the opening moves in a structural shift that will fundamentally alter how commerce operates worldwide.
What Is Agentic Commerce?
Agentic commerce is the next evolution beyond e-commerce and automation. It describes a system in which autonomous AI agents make commercial decisions on behalf of users: researching products, comparing options, negotiating terms, and executing payments. Unlike traditional digital commerce, which requires a human to click, browse, and buy, agentic commerce thrives on machine-to-machine transactions. It combines language models, APIs, and payment protocols to create a seamless loop of intent, decision, and payment.
The distinction matters for business leaders because it changes who the customer is. When an AI agent shops on behalf of a consumer, the agent becomes the functional buyer. It does not respond to banner advertisements, emotional branding, or impulse triggers at checkout. It responds to structured data, product specifications, reviews from authoritative sources, and clear pricing signals. This inverts many of the assumptions upon which modern digital marketing and retail have been built.
The Infrastructure Is Already Taking Shape
Two emerging standards illustrate how rapidly this ecosystem is forming. OpenAI has introduced the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open framework that allows AI agents to interact with a merchant’s existing checkout system, discovering products, building carts, initiating checkout, and handing off payment. Google has introduced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), which focuses on the payment layer itself and provides a structured method for agents to execute transactions with proper authorization, user mandates, and audit trails.
These protocols address a fundamental problem: the global payments infrastructure was built for humans, not autonomous software. When an AI agent initiates a purchase, it breaks the assumption that a human is clicking the buy button. Questions of authorization, accountability, and fraud prevention must be resolved before agentic commerce can scale. The emergence of these standards signals that the industry is moving toward a shared foundation, and early adopters will have a structural advantage.
Two Strategic Responses for Business Leaders
Companies that sell products or services, whether physical goods, digital services, or experiences, will need to respond in one of two ways.
The first is to double down on the human experience. If an all-knowing AI assistant can compare every option on the internet in seconds, the only reason a customer would bypass the agent and visit your platform directly is because the experience itself has independent value. This means investing in loyalty programs, exclusive in-platform benefits, community, and the kind of curated discovery that an algorithm cannot easily replicate. European luxury brands, with their deep heritage of experiential retail, may be particularly well positioned for this approach.
The second is to become radically findable by AI agents. This means ensuring your products are well-reviewed and well-regarded across authoritative sources, because the results an agent surfaces are assembled from hundreds of data points including reviews, articles, and expert opinions. It means strengthening product detail pages with precise specifications and long-tail descriptions that match the specific, contextual queries an agent will make on a consumer’s behalf. And it means adopting protocols like ACP or AP2 so that your checkout and payment systems are agent-ready.
Exhibit 1: Traditional E-Commerce vs. Agentic Commerce
| Dimension | Traditional E-Commerce | Agentic Commerce |
| Buyer | Human browsing a website | AI agent acting on behalf of a human |
| Decision drivers | Brand, UX, emotion, impulse | Data quality, reviews, specifications |
| Transaction initiation | Human clicks “Buy” | Agent executes autonomously |
| Marketing leverage | Ads, SEO, visual merchandising | Structured data, authoritative signals |
| Checkout infrastructure | Built for human interaction | Requires agent-ready protocols (ACP, AP2) |
The Trust Gap Remains the Central Challenge
Current data suggests that only about one third of consumers are comfortable handing full purchase control to an AI-powered assistant. Eight in ten cite stolen-card risk as their top concern with online transactions, and data-misuse worries exceed fifty percent in most surveys. Uptake is likely to remain in the twenty-five to forty percent range until providers pair tokenization and visible fraud controls with clear opt-out mechanisms.
For business leaders, this trust gap is not merely a consumer sentiment problem, it is a strategic planning variable. Organizations that build transparent, secure, agent-compatible systems now will be positioned to capture disproportionate share as consumer comfort grows. Those that wait for mass adoption before acting will find themselves competing for attention in an environment where the buyer is no longer a person browsing a website, but a piece of software evaluating structured data.
The Broader Implication
Agentic commerce represents more than a new sales channel. It signals a deeper transformation in how value is exchanged. As AI agents increasingly mediate between supply and demand, the competitive advantages that defined the digital era: brand awareness, search engine rankings, advertising spend, will give way to a new set of advantages: data quality, protocol readiness, and machine-readable trust signals.
The companies that thrive will be those that understand a deceptively simple truth: when your next customer is an algorithm, the rules of commerce change entirely. The question for every business leader is not whether this shift is coming, but whether their organization will be ready when it arrives.
Sharon Gai
