Agentic commerce

Agentic commerce is buying and selling in which an AI agent acting for a person or business finds products, assembles a checkout and pays, within rules its principal set in advance.

What changes. In ordinary e-commerce a person clicks through a merchant’s checkout. In agentic commerce, software makes those clicks. Visa describes agents that browse, compare, apply the user’s preferences and pay within rules the user sets. Mastercard’s Agent Pay documentation separates two modes: agent-assisted commerce, where the agent helps a person buy, and autonomous agentic commerce, where the agent finds and buys products guided by the person’s stated intent.

What a merchant needs to know. An order from an agent raises three questions that a web checkout never had to answer: which agent is calling, what the person actually authorized, and who carries the loss if the purchase is disputed. Current efforts each take a piece:

• Checkout protocols. The Agentic Commerce Protocol, maintained by OpenAI and Stripe, and the Universal Commerce Protocol let an agent drive a merchant’s own checkout. The ACP README pitches this to agent platforms as a way to let users buy from businesses without the platform becoming the merchant of record.
• Authorization evidence. AP2 v0.2 has the user, or an agent working inside user-signed constraints, sign a Checkout Mandate for the merchant and a Payment Mandate for the payment side.
• Network credentials. Visa Intelligent Commerce provisions agent-specific payment tokens and checks that authorizations match the user’s authenticated instruction. Mastercard Agent Pay requires integrators to register with Mastercard, most as token requestors, and uses agentic tokens plus identifiers that let issuers recognize agent transactions.
• Request-level payment. x402 lets a server ask for payment inside an HTTP or A2A exchange.

Illustrative example. A person tells their agent to reorder printer toner from one of two approved stores, for no more than $60. The agent compares both, builds a checkout at the cheaper store, presents a mandate that fits those limits, and pays with an agent-specific card token. The store verifies the mandate and the token before it accepts the order.

Neighbouring terms. Agent payments covers the money movement itself. A spend limit bounds what the agent may commit to.