Despite their transformative potential, digital shopping bots will likely spend their early days among mundane staples: milk, toothpaste, cat litter. 

These goods carry lower prices, fewer risks and minimal complexities, allowing for simpler transactions as consumers acclimate to an e-commerce world where digital agents make their purchases.

Amid this “getting-to-know-you” phase by consumers, agentic commerce is driving a massive shift of payment and merchandising technology and protocols in the e-commerce world akin to the changes required a generation ago when retail merged with the internet.

As agentic commerce assumes a more prominent role in 2026, banks and card networks are plotting their way through issues of fraud, consumer trust and identity verification, while merchants are confronting concerns over the potential loss of customer data and a tangle of new technical protocols for how to sell through digital bots.

“Consumer behavior with AI is very fluid,” making it difficult to know which protocols or AI providers are likely to gain mass adoption, said Adam Behrens, the co-founder and CEO of New Generation, a software startup that builds agentic commerce tools for merchants. The company’s parent is Internet Forest, based in San Francisco.

“If you invest resources into one ecosystem or platform right now, you are going to find yourself in a spot where the market is going to change, consumers are going to change, and you are going to have to then redo that effort in three months or six months,” Behrens said in an interview last week.

Agentic commerce faces a disconnect from the bots’ research and discovery skills and fully autonomous payments due to the need for authorization, compliance and payment infrastructure, said Andrew Harte, a fintech analyst with BTIG, a financial services firm.

After all, it’s a sizable leap from telling an agent your desire for a new tennis racket to finding a box with that equipment perched at your door without further action. 

This shopping-payment bifurcation is likely to persist “in the near term,” with agentic commerce offering consumers better research and planning capabilities, consulting firm Flagship Advisory Partners said in a Jan. 21 market report. 

“Agentic payments will rely on industry progress building solutions for trust, governance, and interoperability and finding the right use cases where buyers are eager to delegate shopping and payment to AI,” analysts Ben Brown and Pavle Stamenic wrote. The firm is based in Prague, Czechia.

Autonomous payments

In 2026, multiple players in the retail-payments ecosystem – AI companies, card networks, banks, merchants and acquirers – are working on various technical protocols and rules to govern issues such as fraud, mistaken orders and chargebacks. 

The two largest U.S. card networks, Visa and Mastercard, have each developed their own protocols for agentic commerce. Likewise, Google and numerous partners, including digital payments company PayPal Holdings and retailer Walmart, are promoting new technical standards to enable agentic commerce; a consortium led by OpenAI and Stripe offers a separate protocol. 

Google wants its protocols to offer a simpler technical path to enable agentic commerce and avoid “having to do bespoke things, merchant-by-merchant or platform-by-platform, because that’s not sustainable for anybody in the ecosystem,” Stavan Parikh, Google’s vice president and general manager of payments, said in an interview last week.

A protocol “is just a means to an end,” he said. “That’s not where we are trying to differentiate.”

Agentic commerce is a means for “servicing users’ intent better than we have historically been able to, because you better understand users’ intent in an agentic world,” Parikh said.

The profit motive

Despite myriad technical and business model hurdles, agentic commerce presents to the retail ecosystem, its commercial benefits are expected to be robust, according to forecasts. 

About 81% of consumers are inclined to use agentic commerce tools, potentially affecting $1.3 trillion of spending, according to a survey of 2,532 people last year by Boston Consulting Group. An October McKinsey report on agentic commerce pegged the retail sales opportunity as high as $1 trillion for goods in the U.S. by 2030, and up to $5 trillion globally. The consulting firm’s revenue estimates did not include services.

Retailers can realize a conversion rate – the process of a shopper becoming a buyer – that is about 30% higher than other sales channels, said Chris Jones, who studies agentic commerce as a managing director at London-based PSE Consulting, citing recent data from Adobe Analytics and Klarna Group.

“If you know … they are converting 30% more often than non-agentic customers, I think you’d be willing to pay for (that traffic), or at least you try it out and see where it goes,” Jones said Monday in an interview.

In this new world, consumers will emerge “the biggest winners” due to a frictionless shopping experience enabled by their new assistants, BCG concluded. Merchants, on the other hand, will face challenges as their customer relationships and brand relevance erode, the firm postulated in its September 2025 white paper.

Payments players – acquirers, card networks, processors and wallet providers – face a mix of risks and opportunities in the new landscape. Networks and acquirers are poised to fare best, the BCG authors said. 

“This year is all about, for the merchant acquirers, building as much vertical integration above and below the transactions as possible,” Harte said.

Merchants face disruption, given the potential for disintermediation and loss of data about their customers and transactions, Behrens and others said. That risk leads to caution by some players. For example, eBay will prohibit agentic bots from scouring its online marketplace without explicit permission, effective next month.

Payment process upheaval

There’s abundant work to do to first enable agentic transactions with a human consumer still giving purchase approval. “The existing payments infrastructure will encounter significant structural challenges,” McKinsey said in its report, because the “customer” is an AI agent, requiring “new approaches” for consumer authorization, programmed spending and consent.

Merchants and payments providers must view agentic commerce as a new type of customer with a unique payment flow, much the way retailers navigate the differences between their physical stores and e-commerce sites, said Jim Nguyen, the co-founder and CEO of InFlow, a San Francisco-based startup focused on agentic payments.

“It requires a brand new thinking and mental model of how do we enable agents to be a discrete customer that is linked to a real owner or accountability, and then enable them to transact like you and I do online today?” Nguyen said in a Jan. 15 interview.

That next step – agents that are fully autonomous for search, selection and payment – awaits more compliance and anti-fraud safeguards, said Parijat Banerjee, global head of financial services for consulting firm LatentView Analytics. “Until we have a framework that is much more reliable across the country, it might take some more time,” he said in an interview last week, predicting wider autonomous payment adoption late next year or in 2028.

Despite all the changes agentic shopping will bring, the banks, card networks, and payment processors will continue performing largely the same functions they do now, Google’s Parikh predicted. 

“I think the (large language models) will change the friction that the users encounter when they’re going through the flow, but it doesn’t necessarily fundamentally change the responsibilities in that transaction flow,” Parikh said.

Merchants’ challenges

Agentic selling presents a smorgasbord of financial and technical issues for merchants to consider, Jones said.

Among them: What’s the initial investment? How much is an agent-shopper with a high intent to purchase worth in terms of added fees from AI platforms like ChatGPT? Does the transaction provide data? Is the agentic sales channel more prone to chargebacks or fraud? Is it selecting pricier or less-expensive payment options?

Without the technology resources of retail behemoths, some smaller merchants are experimenting with agentic as a sales channel by using gateways into e-commerce systems equipped with the various protocols, said John Lunn, the CEO of payments orchestration startup Gr4vy, based in San Mateo, California.

Such arrangements allow merchants to use their current payment infrastructure and segregate agentic transactions as a distinct workflow, Lunn said in an interview this month. The merchant can also impose certain rules in this environment: No agentic orders larger than $100, for example, or “I don't want anyone buying a Cartier handbag through agentic,” he said.

“You can keep these transactions in its own bucket, manage them, experiment, try different things, but not have to change your entire payment infrastructure at the back end and not have to integrate these protocols,” Lunn said. By year’s end Gr4vy expects to discard half of the work it’s doing on implementing agentic commerce protocols because some of them won’t work, he added.

Another big question for every merchant engaging with agentic commerce: How is inventory exposed to agentic commerce?

Merchants will need to be willing to upload detailed SKU information, along with product characteristics, to the type of “central databases dominated by Amazon and Google today,” Jones said. “The first step in the journey is, can I find a reliable source of product information? And the internet is not a reliable source of product information.”

For those pioneering agentic commerce, including merchants, banks, processors, networks and fintechs, this year will focus on tackling such questions.