Each part of the flywheel must help retailers keep shoppers coming to them directly and win recommendations from agents. “When the agent moves beyond recommendations and starts making payments, the bar for what needs to work rises significantly,” said Felipe Goldin, chief technology officer at Bemobi. “Bemobi’s expertise in recurring services, combined with Mastercard’s security, identity, and trust capabilities helps us bring agentic commerce to clients faster and with greater confidence.” Our solutions are enabled by a network of trusted partners who customize and deploy NVIDIA platforms for every industry and every use case. The technology wasn’t ready then — large language models didn’t exist, and consumers weren’t prepared to trust AI with their wallets.
- Retailers in the first group can turn their data, assortment, and brand relationships into a lead that widens with every sale, with many likely to run shopping agents of their own.
- The filing also named the technology stack that would make it work.
- But the liability rules are unfinished, and trusting an agent to buy without checking is a real leap.
- ChatGPT draws on previous conversations to personalise recommendations.
- This article examines the shift from ideation to synthesis, the cultural risks most companies are ignoring, and why the human-in-the-loop principle is a design requirement, not only a safeguard.
The same logic is reshaping how the big AI platforms compete, a race we track in our Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini comparison. Visa’s own Trust Index, released September 9, 2026, found that only 23% of US consumers trust generative AI to handle payment transactions on their behalf. Spend caps, merchant restrictions, and expiration windows are all set when you grant access. Instead of handing your raw card number to a chatbot, the networks issue a scoped credential, often called an agentic token, that ties a tokenized card to a specific agent, a specific merchant scope, and a specific consent policy. That is the key reason this round is being treated as infrastructure rather than a demo.
Nordstrom offers an example of a staged approach, building capabilities early and expanding them when the demand is clear and the customer experience meets its standards. The agents shape discovery and comparison, and they evaluate retailers on product data, prices, availability, delivery, returns, and offers that they can interpret. Retailers, however, retain assets that agents do not control, including brand trust, proprietary data, access to third-party sellers and advertisers, and established loyalty relationships. https://secondcomingclothing.com/CottonDress/allenberg-cotton-jobs Over the past decade, much of that growth has come from marketplaces, loyalty and personalization programs, and retail media.
Some agentic-commerce experiences today are limited to participating merchants, specific platforms, or transactions that still require a consumer confirmation step rather than running fully autonomously. A merchant who isn’t discoverable inside Google’s AI surfaces risks being invisible to a growing share of AI-assisted shoppers. If you take consumer payments online — healthcare, insurance, property management, utilities, retail — this is an infrastructure decision for this year, not a trend piece for next year. Visa says it had already logged hundreds of agent-initiated transactions with partners by late last year.
What is the challenge that agentic commerce solves for retailers?
“Glance turns moments of inspiration into products consumers can find and buy, on the phones and TVs already in front of them,” said Mansi Jain, chief operating officer at Glance. “As AI reshapes how consumers discover and purchase products, merchants need trusted partners to help them adapt,” said Paolo Zaccardi, CEO and co-founder of Fabrick. “As shopping experiences evolve, Castlery is always looking for new ways to help customers discover products with greater ease and personalization,” said Shimin Gu, data product and tech head at Castlery. “Our work with Mastercard will help us explore AI-powered shopping experiences that make it easier for our customers to find the right product, complete purchases with confidence and receive recommendations and support throughout their journey with us.” AI agents will change the buying interface again, shifting commerce from search and discovery to checkout and disputes,” said Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard. Leading businesses, technology providers and commerce platforms, including Castlery, Fabrick, Fiserv, FreedomPay, Getnet, Global Payments, Moneris, Nexi, Network International, Trip.com and Worldline plan to use Agent Suite for Merchants to help shape the future of agentic commerce.
What is agentic commerce, and how does it change online shopping?
And you can revoke it in real time from your bank app, which makes the next attempted charge fail at authorization. When the settlement layer is the network everyone already supports, adoption becomes a plumbing decision rather than a fee negotiation. The Visa version is different because it runs on rails that banks and merchants already trust. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. “AI is reshaping how consumers discover, choose and buy, and merchants need a simple and trusted way to participate in this new environment. Our focus is to make this transition simple, secure, and scalable, enabling businesses to unlock new opportunities and deliver better customer experiences.”
Over the next two years, retailers plan to deepen both their personalized propositions and the capabilities behind them. To win the evaluation game, retailers need a broad assortment and clean, current data on products, prices, inventory, and fulfillment. The right balance will differ by retailer and should allow marketplace and retail media businesses to compete for agent-led demand while preserving the customer insights that support loyalty and personalization.
The main companies building agentic commerce are Visa (partnered with OpenAI for ChatGPT), Mastercard with its Agent Pay framework, and Google with its open AP2 and Universal Commerce Protocol standards. As American Banker reported, if customers start opening an AI assistant instead of their banking app to handle transactions, banks could lose the direct relationship. For shoppers, discovery and checkout collapse into one step, which is convenient but shifts power toward whichever agent you use.
- “We’re future-proofing retail media by exploring opportunities beyond onsite formats,” says Cano.
- Referral counts understate how much traffic agents drive.
- Introduced in January, Mastercard Agent Suite helps businesses prepare for agentic commerce through access to services such as Mastercard’s AI consulting.
- For shoppers, discovery and checkout collapse into one step, which is convenient but shifts power toward whichever agent you use.
Just 4% of consumers would let an agent finish a purchase on its own, even though shopping-related use of generative AI rose 35% in nine months and more than 60% of consumers say they trust what it tells them. Shoppers are already handing discovery and evaluation to agents. More than one-third are running agentic commerce pilots, and 18% are deploying these at scale, while 24% have yet to move beyond assessment. With those visits included, agents’ effect on website traffic can be up to four times the referral figure. A shopper who browses and chooses inside an external AI platform and then comes to the website on their own is not counted. Referral counts understate how much traffic agents drive.
The Visa version runs on the card network merchants already trust, which removes the fee barrier and makes broad acceptance far more likely. On September 17, 2026, Mastercard also rolled out an option that lets people give an AI agent a virtual card to buy online without checking in before each purchase, https://cognifyo.com/articles/rfid-tagging-system-analysis/ with limits on spending, retailers, or required approval, according to Fortune. Visa, the largest payment network outside China, provides the payment authorization and fraud monitoring to do this safely at scale, and users will be able to link their Visa card to ChatGPT. “Wizard is designed to turn conversational intent into confident purchase decisions. By integrating with Agent Connect, Wizard gives shoppers accurate product information, real-time inventory and secure native checkout — helping them move seamlessly from intent to purchase,” said Melissa Bridgeford, CEO of Wizard. “Trust, interoperability and merchant control are the foundation of agentic commerce, and we’re proud to work with Mastercard to be the first to bring this capability to Canadian businesses,” said Mia Huntington, chief sales and marketing officer at Moneris. “Agent Connect gives that discovery a trusted path to purchase and gives the whole category a common way to work together. We’re thrilled to be building on it with Mastercard.”
Merchants should consult qualified legal counsel and their payment processor before making changes to payment infrastructure or authorization policies. Payment technology standards, card network protocols, and regulatory requirements in this space are changing quickly. Clean product data, updated fraud controls, clear authorization language, and a broad payment mix are the practical starting points — not a rebuilt payment stack. What we offer is a flexible, PCI DSS Level 1-certified platform handling in-person, online, mobile, and recurring payments from one system, built to integrate with new rails as these standards mature.