Assisted Search
The agent evaluates products or merchants on behalf of the consumer. The consumer navigates the merchant site to build a cart and complete checkout.
Agentic Commerce
Built at every layer of the stack at once — and we track all of them.
Agentic commerce is being built at every layer of the stack at once. Autonomous AI agents are moving from helping consumers find products to executing purchases on their behalf, shifting the consumer from active shopper to delegator and shifting payments from user-initiated checkouts to agent-mediated transactions.
The category is moving fast. Every major card network has launched an agentic commerce framework, AI assistants are becoming a regular touchpoint earlier in the shopping journey, and the consumer experience itself is being rebuilt — from search bars and filtered grids to prompts that return curated paths to a single converting choice. The infrastructure to support this — agent identity, intent verification, agentic tokens and cryptograms, liability frameworks — did not exist eighteen months ago and is now being built in public, in parallel, by networks, big tech, payment platforms, and specialised startups.
| Legacy E-commerce | Agentic Commerce |
|---|---|
| Home → Search → Filter → Bounce | Prompt → Curated Path → Convert |
| Human shoppers | Human and AI-to-AI shopping |
| Web storefront + AI shopping assistant | AI storefront |
Four stages of agentic commerce
From assisted search today to delegated end-to-end shopping tomorrow — four discrete steps along two axes: how autonomous the agent is, and how mature the ecosystem around it has become.
Assisted Shopping, Merchant Checkout
The agent evaluates options or builds a shopping cart on behalf of the consumer but redirects the consumer to the merchant's website or application to complete the checkout. The experience moves the consumer out of the agent environment into the merchant checkout flow.
Assisted Shopping, Embedded Checkout
The agent evaluates products or merchants and presents the options to the consumer. The consumer selects the item they want to purchase and initiates an instant checkout within the agentic commerce platform — by entering a card number, by using a standard e-commerce "buy" button, or by using their Click-to-Pay profile.
Delegated End-to-End Shopping
The agent handles search, selection, and checkout without requiring the consumer to visit the merchant website or application. The consumer may approve the final choice within the agent environment, or delegate rules for the agent to act autonomously and complete the transaction. Intent is no longer tied to a single transaction but expressed as standing authorisation — spend limits, merchant categories, price thresholds. The agent executes when conditions are met.
The ecosystem
AI agent providers
LLM platforms (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity, Amazon, Microsoft) that interpret consumer intent and act across discovery, decision-making, and checkout.
Payment networks
Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and UnionPay, each providing agent identity (KYA), intent registration, agentic tokens and cryptograms, and emerging value-added services such as personalised data tokens.
Standards & protocol authors
Anthropic (MCP), Google (A2A, AP2, UCP), OpenAI and Stripe (ACP), Cloudflare (Web Bot Auth), Visa (TAP), Coinbase (x402), Stripe and Tempo (MPP), with EMVCo positioned to provide convergence on the payments side.
Issuers
Banks that authorise transactions made by an agent on behalf of their cardholder and that ultimately bear the credit and fraud risk on the back end.
Acquirers & PSPs
Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Fiserv, Global Payments, and others routing agent-originated transactions to the networks and increasingly acting as the integration point for merchants entering agentic channels.
Merchants & marketplaces
Retailers, marketplaces, and platforms (Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, Klarna, and many more) that need to expose their catalogues to agents, accept agent-driven checkouts, and decide which agents they trust.
Specialised infrastructure providers
Startups such as PayOS, Skyfire, Nekuda, Crossmint, Rye, Basis Theory, Firmly, and Prava that are building the technical rails the major frameworks depend on to reach live volume.
Regulators & liability frameworks
A fast-moving area where rules around chargebacks, consumer protection, and disclosure are still being defined for transactions where the consumer never pressed a buy button.
What makes agentic commerce different from traditional online checkout is not any single new player, but the way the existing ones now have to coordinate around one that did not exist before. The agent acts on behalf of the consumer, the credential still sits with the issuer, the protocol is set by a working group, and the liability lands somewhere the rules have not yet finished defining. Designing or evaluating any proposition in this space means picking your position before that settlement happens — not after.
What we offer
Our expertise spans the full agentic commerce landscape. We track every major framework — Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay, American Express ACE, UnionPay APOP, and the proprietary stacks emerging from Alipay, Amazon, Klarna, PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe — alongside the open protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP, UCP, AP2, TAP, x402, MPP) and the specialised startup layer that ties them together. Our consultants combine fluency in payment-network mechanics — Know Your Agent, intent registration and validation, agentic tokens and cryptograms, personalised data tokens, passkey-bound authentication — with a working understanding of the AI agent stack and the commercial dynamics that will determine which partnerships and protocols win at scale. For payment networks defining their agentic strategy, we contribute across the journey from concept through architecture to launch. For issuers, acquirers, PSPs, and merchant platforms deciding where to play and how to integrate, we map the landscape, structure the partnership choices, and pressure-test the business case beneath the headline announcements.
