Agentic commerce
Category
Agentic commerce is commerce in which an AI agent initiates or completes a transaction on behalf of a person or an organization. It spans consumer purchasing through AI assistants and business-to-business flows where agents buy compute, data, and services from other systems.
How it works
An agent acts under delegated authority, selects goods or services, and transacts through a protocol that carries proof of that authority alongside the payment instruction. Several protocols compete: AP2 and Universal Commerce Protocol from Google, the Agentic Commerce Protocol from OpenAI and Stripe, x402 for HTTP-native machine payments, and network-specific schemes from Visa and Mastercard.
Example
A consumer assembles a multi-item cart inside an AI assistant and checks out using stored credentials, without visiting the retailer's site. A business agent purchases API access forty thousand times in a month across three vendors. Both are agentic commerce; they raise different questions for the seller's books.
Common questions
Is agentic commerce only retail?
No. The term is most visible in consumer shopping, but business-to-business flows — agents buying compute, data, and API access — carry the harder accounting questions, because the payment often arrives with no invoice, order, or contract upstream of it.
What changes for the seller?
The cart may be assembled somewhere the seller does not control, the credential may be held by a third party, and the transaction may settle on a protocol the seller did not choose.