Agentic commerce is buying and selling in which an AI agent, acting for a person or business, searches for products, compares options, fills a basket and completes the payment, with the human setting the goal and limits rather than clicking through each step. It extends e-commerce from websites and apps built for people to software that machines can read and act on directly.
The idea moved from research to live products in 2025, when AI companies, card networks and payment processors launched protocols and services for agent-led purchases. It is distinct from a chatbot that only recommends products, and from older automated payments such as recurring payments, which repeat a fixed charge. In agentic commerce the software decides what to buy within the authority it has been given, which is recorded in an agentic mandate.
Agentic commerce in plain terms
Think of a trusted personal assistant with a company card. You say, "Find me a pair of black running shoes in size 10, under $120, delivered by Friday." The assistant visits shops, compares prices, picks the best pair and pays. You never see the checkout page, but you set the rules, and you can check the receipt afterwards.
Agentic commerce gives that assistant's job to software. The hard part is not finding shoes; it is trust. The shop needs to know the assistant is genuine and really works for you, the bank needs to know you approved the spending, and you need a way to complain if the assistant buys the wrong thing. Most of the work in this field goes into answering those three questions.
History
Voice assistants and one-click ordering offered early forms of delegated buying, but large language models made general-purpose shopping agents practical. In late April 2025 Mastercard announced Agent Pay and Visa announced Visa Intelligent Commerce, both built on tokenization so that agents could carry card credentials limited to a particular agent and use. On 16 September 2025 Google published the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) with more than 60 partners. On 29 September 2025 OpenAI and Stripe released the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, starting with US Etsy sellers. In October 2025 Visa and Cloudflare published a Trusted Agent Protocol to help merchants tell legitimate agents from bots, and PayPal agreed with OpenAI to bring its wallet to ChatGPT in 2026. Google added agentic checkout to US Search that November, and in January 2026 it introduced a Universal Commerce Protocol with Shopify, Walmart and other retailers.
Plans have shifted quickly. In March 2026 OpenAI said Instant Checkout was moving into merchants' apps inside ChatGPT, and that it would prioritise product discovery while keeping ACP as the underlying infrastructure. In April 2026 Google donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance.
How it works
An agentic purchase usually passes through four steps:
- Instruction. The user states what they want and sets limits on price, merchants, timing or categories.
- Discovery. The agent reads machine-readable product feeds or merchant APIs to find and compare items.
- Checkout. The agent builds a cart with the merchant, which stays the merchant of record and accepts or declines the order.
- Payment. A payment service provider passes a scoped token instead of the raw card number, so the agent can pay once, for one merchant and amount, without seeing the full credential.
Most of these payments run over the existing card networks as card-not-present transactions, though AP2 also supports bank transfers and stablecoins.
Risks and open questions
- Liability. Card rules were written for a human cardholder, so it is not settled who pays when an agent misreads an instruction. Networks and processors are still working out how chargeback and dispute rules apply, and signed mandates aim to prove what the user approved.
- Authentication. Rules such as Europe's strong customer authentication assume a person is present, which fits poorly with an agent acting on its own; passkeys and device-bound credentials are the main answers being tested.
- Fraud and identity. Merchants must separate approved agents from scrapers and attackers, and criminals may target agents with fake listings or instructions hidden in web pages.
- Platform conflicts. In November 2025 Amazon sued Perplexity, alleging that its Comet browser agent shopped on Amazon while disguised as an ordinary browser; Perplexity denied wrongdoing.
- Privacy. Agents need access to payment details, addresses and purchase histories, which brings data privacy rules into play.
Regulation
No jurisdiction had adopted a dedicated agentic commerce law as of November 2026. Existing rules apply: consumer protection and payments law, card network rules, and data protection regimes such as the GDPR in the European Union. In the United States, questions about whether a purchase an agent makes outside its instructions counts as unauthorised under Regulation E or card dispute rules remain largely untested. Industry groups are developing standards, including the FIDO Alliance working groups that took over AP2.