McKinsey projects that the U.S. retail agentic commerce opportunity could be worth one trillion dollars by 2030, and globally as much as five trillion in their new report, “The Agentic Commerce Opportunity: How AI Agents Are Ushering in a New Era for Consumers and Merchants”. The report provides a clear lens into what’s ahead: a world where autonomous AI agents act on your behalf to shop, compare and make purchases. In that world, the role of payments is no longer a simple handoff from buyer to merchant; it becomes a foundational component of the agent-to-merchant choreography.
This is what bankers, fintech executives, and payments professionals need to know about how payments must evolve to support agentic commerce.
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From Humans Clicking To Agents Purchasing
McKinsey defines “agentic commerce” as shopping powered by AI agents that anticipate customer needs, navigate options, negotiate deals, and execute transactions aligned with human intent. The report emphasises that one of the key domains where disruption will occur is payments and fraud detection. In an agentic scenario, the customer is not always human, often it is the agent acting on behalf of the human. That shifts the entire payments paradigm.
In traditional commerce, the sequence is customer → merchant → checkout → payment. With agentic commerce, there is instead customer → customer agent → merchant, merchant agent or broker agent → checkout → payment, complicated by delegated authorisation, continuous micro-decisions, and context-rich intent flows. Payments systems must therefore evolve to support delegated authorisation, agent identity and trust, programmatic spend controls, rich transactional metadata, and real-time settlement and fraud detection.
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Case Studies: Payments In Action
Take the example of Stripe and OpenAI. A month ago Stripe announced its Instant Checkout integration in ChatGPT, enabled by its new “Agentic Commerce Protocol.” ChatGPT users can buy goods directly in the chat. Stripe issues a Shared Payment Token scoped to the merchant and cart total. That token is processed by the merchant backend while Stripe manages risk and fraud scoring. Here, payments infrastructure is fundamentally re-architected. The token is not just a card transaction; it carries context about the agent, cart, merchant, and consumer, all of which enables risk management in an agentic scenario.
Likewise, last week PayPal launched its “Agentic Commerce Services” suite, including an “Agent Ready” payments solution and “Store Sync” catalog and order-management offering built for AI-driven discovery and checkout. The solution supports multiple payments protocols and AI platforms, letting merchants be discoverable and purchasable by agents through one integration. Identity verification, buyer protection, and fraud detection are core components. The payments layer thus becomes the gatekeeper and enabler of agentic commerce, not just a transaction facilitator.
Three Payments Imperatives for Agentic Commerce
For banks, fintechs, and payments players positioning for this shift, three priorities stand out.
1. Design for agent-first authorisation
Payments architectures must allow a consumer to delegate purchase authority to an agent, define constraints such as budget, merchant types, and timing, and allow that agent to transact securely. Protocols like the Agent Payments Protocol and Agent-to-Agent payments are emerging to support these linkages. Without this, consumers will be asked to intervene in flows that are meant to be seamless and autonomous.
2. Embed context, identity, and tokenisation as the backbone
In traditional online payments, the user authorises a card payment. In agentic commerce, the system needs to record that an agent acted, what decision path led to the purchase, which proxies were used, and that the transaction was legitimate. Fraud prevention shifts from human-versus-bot detection to verifying which agent is authorised and acting on behalf of the customer. Tokenisation becomes critical: agent identifiers, cart mandates, and contextual payment tokens must all be woven in so payments providers can preserve their role and manage risk.
3. Enable seamless experience while maintaining merchant and brand control
The consumer expectation in this world is frictionless shopping, ask the agent, and the purchase happens. But the merchant must still be the merchant of record, maintain brand integrity, and control fulfilment and returns. Both Stripe and PayPal emphasise that merchants retain control over brand, inventory, fulfilment, and customer relationships. Payments platforms must enable this balance: agentic checkout that gives the merchant transparency, analytics, and control, while ensuring consumer protection.
Why Payments Players Should Care
Payments infrastructure sits at the centre of this shift: every agentic commerce flow converges at the payments rail. For providers in the payments ecosystem, the challenge is clear: adapt infrastructure, protocols, tokenization, identity, and merchant adjudication layers to support agents acting for humans, and do it before legacy architectures leave you behind.
If you get this right, you will be central to the next transformation in commerce. If you don’t, you may become the bottleneck that holds it back.