What Is Agentic Commerce

Agentic commerce refers to commerce flows where AI agents assist or act on behalf of users to complete transactions. These agents interpret intent and execute actions such as product discovery, cart creation, form completion, checkout, and delegated tasks like reorders or event-driven purchases.

What distinguishes agentic commerce from earlier automation is autonomy paired with accountability. The agent does not merely suggest; it acts, within clearly defined permissions, controls, and constraints.

Industry discussions consistently emphasise that successful agentic commerce must preserve three principles: user control, trustworthy execution, and compatibility with existing commercial and payment infrastructure.

Why Agentic Commerce Is Emerging Now

This shift is driven by two converging forces.

First, advances in AI have made it possible for systems to reliably interpret intent rather than just commands. Second, commerce itself has become deeply fragmented across platforms, apps, and channels. Navigating this complexity manually is inefficient.

Mckinsey notes that AI-driven interfaces are increasingly reducing friction across customer journeys, particularly in discovery and decision-making, as systems move from reactive tools to proactive executors of intent.

Agentic commerce is the logical extension of this trend but only if the underlying payment and authorisation rails can support it.

The Foundational Pillars of Agentic Commerce

As agent-driven interactions scale, industry frameworks converge around a common set of requirements. These pillars are not optional. They are prerequisites for trust, compliance, and adoption.

• Accuracy
  Agents must perform only verifiable actions using legitimate merchant data. Every lookup, price, and checkout step must align with real inventory and policies, reducing unintended outcomes.

• Anonymity
  Agents should never access or store raw payment credentials. Tokenisation and proxy credential models ensure sensitive data remains within secure, PCI-compliant environments.
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• Auditability
  Every agent-initiated action must be logged end to end. Traceability is essential for dispute resolution, risk analysis, compliance, and operational debugging.
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• Authentication
  Both the user and the agent must be reliably authenticated. This often requires delegated or step-up authentication aligned with regional regulations such as Strong Customer Authentication (SCA).
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• Authorisation
  Agents must act only within explicitly scoped consent. Mandates may include spending limits, time windows, merchant constraints, or revocation mechanisms.

These principles closely align with guidance from card networks, regulators, and standards bodies exploring AI-driven transaction models.

The Value Proposition for the Payments Ecosystem

Agentic commerce introduces tangible benefits that are driving rapid experimentation across merchants, platforms, and payment providers.

• Reduced friction in discovery and checkout
• More accurate alignment with user preferences
• New commerce surfaces through AI assistants and OS-level platforms
• Delegated commerce for repeat and event-based purchases
• Greater interoperability through standardised schemas and APIs

According to BCG, reducing friction at moments of intent can significantly increase conversion and lifetime value, provided trust and transparency are maintained throughout the transaction lifecycle.
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How Leading Ecosystems Are Approaching Agentic Commerce Infrastructure

The Challenges That Still Need Solving

Despite momentum, agentic commerce introduces new complexities that the ecosystem must address carefully.

• Standardising merchant data : Agents depend on consistent catalog, pricing, availability, and policy structures. Merchant systems remain highly fragmented today.
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• Strengthening user consent models : Agent-initiated transactions require cryptographically verifiable consent, scoped permissions, and clear revocation paths.
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• Managing risk and liability : Dispute resolution, fraud handling, and liability assignment must be clearly defined when actions are taken by agents rather than humans.
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• Authenticating agents themselves : Merchants and issuers must trust that requests originate from verified agents acting legitimately on behalf of real users.
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• Avoiding protocol fragmentation : Multiple networks and platforms are developing parallel standards. Without interoperability, adoption will stall.
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• Preserving user visibility and control : Users must understand what agents are doing, under which conditions, and with what consequences.

McKinsey highlights that trust breakdowns, not technology limitations are the primary reason automation initiatives fail to scale in financial services.

What This Means for Payments Infrastructure

Agentic commerce does not eliminate the fundamentals of payments. It reinforces them.

Secure authorisation, identity verification, auditability, and interoperability become even more critical when transactions are delegated. Infrastructure providers must support agent-led flows without weakening compliance or increasing risk exposure.

Early adoption is likely to focus on human-present agentic commerce, where users remain within merchant applications but benefit from agent-driven assistance. These scenarios offer a controlled environment to validate consent, visibility, and accountability models before fully autonomous flows emerge.

How FT Views the Shift Toward Agentic Commerce

At FT, we see agentic commerce not as a replacement for existing payment systems, but as a new interaction layer that sits above them.

The institutions that succeed will be those that prepare their payment and orchestration layers for intent-driven execution,without compromising governance, reliability, or security. This requires:

• Strong authorisation and mandate frameworks
  
• Tokenised and interoperable payment rails
  
• End-to-end observability and auditability
  
• Vendor-agnostic architectures that adapt as standards evolve
  

Agentic commerce will not be won by interface innovation alone. It will be won by infrastructure that is resilient, composable, and trusted.

The Next Phase of Commerce Is Intent-Led

Agentic commerce marks a natural evolution in how users express intent and how transactions are executed. Interfaces may fade into the background, but the core requirements of commerce remain unchanged: secure payments, clear consent, trusted identity, and interoperable systems.

The payments ecosystem now faces a strategic choice. Prepare infrastructure for intent-led execution, or risk being bypassed as agents become the primary actors in digital commerce.

To explore how your payments and banking infrastructure can evolve for agentic, intent-driven commerce.

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