{
  "id": 5048802,
  "title": "Spreedly Sees Good Bots Becoming an Agentic Commerce Channel",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/02/spreedly-sees-good-bots-becoming-an-agentic-commerce-channel",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-02T08:01:06.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "PYMNTS",
    "slug": "pymnts",
    "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/commerce/ecommerce/2026/agentic-payments-turn-bot-traffic-into-a-merchant-revenue-channel/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Spreedly's Adam Hiatt says the traditional notion of bots in digital commerce is being challenged. While bots have historically been seen as malicious actors associated with fraud, Hiatt points out that not all bots are bad. As artificial intelligence moves from merely recommending products to initiating transactions, a new type of commerce channel is emerging: agentic commerce. This shift means that merchants need to rethink their approach to automated traffic. Instead of filtering or blocking bots, the focus is on determining whether a bot represents a legitimate customer with genuine purchase intent. This distinction is crucial, as it opens up a new bottom-of-the-funnel traffic source for merchants and changes the nature of conversion. For example, a customer arriving through an AI assistant may convert at a rate two to three times higher than those arriving through traditional search. The implications for payments, fraud, and customer acquisition are significant. Merchants must ensure that their catalogs are available to AI platforms and that the necessary payments infrastructure is in place. Additionally, brand trust becomes important, as consumers may delegate discovery to AI while still relying on familiar merchant brands for final approval. Payments providers, orchestration platforms, and fraud vendors are working to build the necessary infrastructure to connect merchant catalogs, payment credentials, agent identities, and risk decisions. This tidal wave of change means that merchants will need to rely on partners to quickly and safely adopt agentic commerce channels.",
  "summary": "Watch more: Digital Shift With Spreedly’s Adam Hiatt Bots are bad. That, at least, has been digital commerce’s operating assumption since the category’s inception. Automated activity was associated with credential stuffing, scraping, inventory hoarding and fraud. Legitimate customers, it went without saying, were assumed to be human ones. As a result, merchants have traditionally treated […] The…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}