Agentic commerce: Is Payments the winner this time?

Agentic commerce, involving AI-powered shopping tools, currently accounts for less than 1% of overall e-commerce activity despite the recent launch of new AI shopping tools by Meta and Anthropic. Meta introduced Muse, an AI agent capable of autonomously handling various tasks, while Anthropic unveiled Commerce Agents to assist companies in creating shopping agents and merchant-side operational agents.

Additionally, Instinct, a messaging-first personal AI agent allowing users to delegate online errands via text or call, has gained popularity, particularly in Silicon Valley. This development follows OpenAI abandoning its Instant Checkout feature and Google concentrating more on infrastructure and standards rather than controlling agentic payments.

Analysts at Bernstein argue that agentic commerce is unlikely to pose a risk to Visa and Mastercard. Instead, they view it as a catalyst for increased digitization, transactions, and value-added services. Cards are expected to remain the preferred payment method in the agentic world due to their established dispute management mechanisms, industry standards, and extensive network of credentials and merchants. Any attempt to disrupt card-based payments for agentic use is likely to fail.

The recent launches of AI shopping agents do not aim to control merchant payments; instead, they focus on providing seamless ways for consumers to execute purchases. For instance, Muse offers single-use virtual cards for transaction security. Visa and Mastercard have developed their own agentic tokens and standards, including Trusted Agent Protocol, Verifiable Intent, Agent Pay, and Intelligent Commerce, indicating their commitment to this emerging field. Bernstein predicts that 100% of agentic transactions will be tokenized.

However, agent-to-agent micro-payments are still in the proof-of-concept stage, with Coinbase and Cloudflare's x402 protocol generating a mere $0.5 million to $1 million in monthly volume after a year since its launch, with average transaction sizes around $0.20. Agentic commerce also introduces greater complexity for merchants, creating differentiation opportunities for processors like Adyen.

Adyen recently launched Adyen Agentic, enabling enterprises to sell through AI platforms without the need to rebuild commerce systems for each new channel.