Agentic commerce is buying and selling in which software agents, usually built on large language models (LLMs), carry out some or all of a purchase for a person: finding products, comparing offers, filling a basket and paying. The human sets the goal and the limits; the agent does the clicking. McKinsey, in an October 17, 2025 report, defined it as "shopping powered by intelligent AI agents capable of anticipating, personalizing, and automating every step of the process". The term exists because the web's commercial machinery - search ads, product pages, checkout forms, card fraud rules - assumes a human at the keyboard, and model developers, payment networks and retailers are now rebuilding each layer for a buyer that is not one.

The phrase describes a market rather than a single product. A personal agent is the software acting for one consumer; agentic commerce is the wider system of protocols, payment credentials, merchant integrations and advertising that lets such agents transact.

How an agentic purchase works

A transaction passes through four stages, and each has acquired its own technical standard since late 2024.

Intent and mandate. A person gives an instruction in plain language - a carry-on suitcase under $200, say - and sets how much autonomy the agent has. Walmart, for example, lets shoppers cap its agent's spending at $50, $100 or $200, according to PPC Land's report on a Salesforce survey.

Discovery. The agent needs product data. A browsing agent, such as Perplexity's Comet or Meta's Muse, reads ordinary web pages and clicks through them. A protocol agent queries structured endpoints instead. The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), released by OpenAI and Stripe on September 29, 2025, added a feed interface in its April 17, 2026 version, in which merchants push catalogues to agents as JSON Lines files, one product per line, according to the specification's changelog. Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), published in November 2024, is the common way an agent connects to a merchant's tools.

Checkout. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), launched on January 11, 2026 at the National Retail Federation conference, has merchants declare capabilities in a profile - Checkout, Order, Identity Linking through OAuth 2.0, Payment Token Exchange - which an agent can call over REST, MCP or Google's Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol. It was developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and more than 20 companies endorsed it, including Visa, Mastercard, Adyen and Stripe. The merchant remains the merchant of record, keeping the customer relationship, fulfilment and returns.

Payment authority. The hardest problem is proving that the person authorised a purchase the agent made. Three approaches compete. Under ACP, the payment provider issues a delegated vault token bound to an "allowance": a maximum amount in minor units (2000 for $20), a merchant identifier and an expiry time, according to the ACP specification. Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), announced on September 16, 2025, uses cryptographically signed mandates: a closed mandate for an exact basket when the person is present, or an open mandate with constraints, such as a price ceiling, that the agent's later purchase is checked against. Version 0.2 shipped on April 28, 2026, when Google donated the protocol to the FIDO Alliance. The card networks, finally, issue agentic tokens. Mastercard's Agent Pay requires agents to register and ties each network token to the agent that made the purchase, creating an audit trail. Visa's Intelligent Commerce issues a cryptogram only after the purchase is matched to the consumer's prompt. "Anything else that happens is not going to be allowed on the token," Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth products, told a podcast in September 2025.

To tell legitimate agents from bots, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, published on October 14, 2025, and the Internet Engineering Task Force draft Web Bot Auth have agents sign each HTTP request so that sites can verify them cryptographically.

Origin and evolution

No one is credited with coining the term. It grew out of "agentic AI", the industry label for LLM systems that take actions, and entered payments vocabulary in late 2024. The Paypers dates the build-out from Stripe's agent toolkit on November 14, 2024 and MCP later that month.

Amazon introduced Buy for Me, in which its agent completes purchases on other brands' websites, on April 3, 2025. Mastercard announced Agent Pay on April 29, 2025, and Visa announced Intelligent Commerce a day later. The protocol race followed in the autumn: AP2 in September, ACP on September 29 with Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol in October. On the same day ACP launched, PayOS announced what it described as the first live transaction using a Mastercard agentic token. PayPal added Agent Ready and Store Sync on October 28, 2025, and Google introduced agentic checkout for price-tracked items on November 13, 2025.

The first retreat came quickly. OpenAI shut down Instant Checkout in March 2026, six months after launch. Walmart's data showed in-chat conversion rates three times lower than when users clicked through to its own site, and OpenAI moved to embedding retailers' own assistants in ChatGPT instead. EcomCrew reported that only about 12 Shopify merchants went live. Google pressed on, switching on AI Mode checkout for Shopify stores by default and announcing Universal Cart on May 19, 2026.

Why it matters for marketers

Most digital advertising is priced on a person seeing a page, and an agent that pays on its own removes that view. PPC Land has argued that Amazon's $69 billion advertising business hangs on a browser lawsuit for this reason: an agent shopping inside Amazon can skip the sponsored listings that pay for it. Affiliates face a narrower version of the same loss, since Universal Cart applies discount codes inside Google's surfaces and removes the click coupon sites are paid on.

The forecasts are large and not comparable. McKinsey projected that by 2030 agents could "orchestrate" $900 billion to $1 trillion of US business-to-consumer retail revenue and $3 trillion to $5 trillion globally, counting goods only. Morgan Stanley, on December 8, 2025, estimated that agentic shoppers could account for $190 billion to $385 billion of US e-commerce spending by 2030, or 10% to 20% of the market. McKinsey measures revenue an agent influences; Morgan Stanley measures spending agents complete.

Current traffic is far smaller. HUMAN Security's report for 2025 found agentic traffic up 7,851% from a low base, yet checkout pages drew only 2.31% of agent activity, against 77% for product and search pages, according to PPC Land's summary. Google's Vidhya Srinivasan, who runs ads and commerce, said in February 2026 that agent-to-agent commerce would bring "more noise" than mainstream use that year.

For advertisers, the practical shift is towards product data as storefront. Agents read feeds, structured attributes and identifiers rather than landing pages, which is why OpenAI's ads platform now builds shopping ads from catalogues of up to 1 million products, and why missing Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) matter.

Limitations and disputes

Consumer reluctance. A Salesforce survey of more than 2,500 shoppers in four countries found 76% did not want a personal agent buying for them; only 19% of agent users had used one at checkout. The findings are vendor-sourced, and Salesforce sells agent software.

Merchant consent. Amazon sued Perplexity on November 4, 2025 over Comet. A district court barred the agent in March 2026; the Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction on August 4, 2026, holding that the user does the accessing, but left contract claims open. Amazon then blocked Meta's Muse on September 20, 2026, saying third-party agents "should operate openly and respect service provider decisions". Technical defences block agents too: Blend's audit found bot protection refused its shopping agent at 29 of 200 retailers, although most of those publicly welcomed AI crawlers.

Fraud and liability. HUMAN found only half a percentage point between benign and malicious automation patterns. Card rules assume a person pressed the button; AP2's documentation treats accountability for a wrong purchase as an open question, and Visa said in 2025 that it was still building dispute and chargeback rules for agent transactions.

Incentives. Economists Alex Imas and Andrey Fradkin argued in January 2026 that interfaces built for humans and unsettled law, not model capability, hold agents back. An agent owned by an advertising platform or a retailer may also serve interests other than the shopper's, and no regulator has set a disclosure standard for paid influence on an agent's choice.

Conversational commerce. Shopping through chat, typically with a brand's bot answering questions. The human still decides and pays; agentic commerce delegates both.

Commerce media. Advertising sold using a retailer's or payment company's transaction data. It may be sold to agents' operators, but it describes media, not delegated buying.

Agentic advertising. Buyer and seller agents trading media through standards such as the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP). The buyer there is an advertiser, not a consumer.

Personal agent. The software acting for one person; agentic commerce is the market such agents transact in.

Recent developments

The past week shows the field's tension. Mastercard said on November 12, 2026 that an AI travel agent, working with Travelport, Booked AI and Basis Theory, had "searched, booked, paid for and ticketed a live flight" with an Agent Pay token, according to PYMNTS, a day after United Airlines barred unauthorised third-party agents. Andreessen Horowitz partners argued on November 11 that retailers "will have to fight for bots' business", as HUMAN measured agentic browser traffic growing eightfold between August and October. Salesforce projects $75.8 billion in AI-driven Cyber Week spending, without a published method. Whether agents become the dominant buyer, or a research tool before a human checkout, is the open question for the 2026 holiday season.

Timeline

  • November 14, 2024 - Stripe releases its agent toolkit
  • November 2024 - Anthropic publishes the Model Context Protocol
  • April 3, 2025 - Amazon introduces Buy for Me
  • April 29, 2025 - Mastercard announces Agent Pay
  • April 30, 2025 - Visa announces Intelligent Commerce
  • June 25, 2025 - Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027
  • September 16, 2025 - Google announces the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
  • September 29, 2025 - OpenAI and Stripe release the Agentic Commerce Protocol with Instant Checkout in ChatGPT; PayOS reports a first live Mastercard agentic token transaction
  • October 14, 2025 - Visa publishes the Trusted Agent Protocol
  • October 17, 2025 - McKinsey forecasts $900 billion to $1 trillion in US agent-orchestrated retail revenue by 2030
  • October 28, 2025 - PayPal launches Agent Ready and Store Sync
  • November 4, 2025 - Amazon sues Perplexity over Comet
  • November 13, 2025 - Google launches agentic checkout for price-tracked items
  • December 8, 2025 - Morgan Stanley forecasts $190 billion to $385 billion in US agentic e-commerce by 2030
  • December 18, 2025 - Visa reports hundreds of agent-initiated pilot transactions
  • January 11, 2026 - Google launches the Universal Commerce Protocol with more than 20 endorsers
  • March 2026 - OpenAI shuts down Instant Checkout; a district court bars Comet from Amazon accounts
  • April 17, 2026 - ACP adds product feeds, carts and orders
  • April 28, 2026 - AP2 version 0.2 released and donated to the FIDO Alliance
  • May 19, 2026 - Google announces Universal Cart
  • August 4, 2026 - Ninth Circuit vacates the Comet injunction
  • September 8, 2026 - Meta releases Muse
  • September 20, 2026 - Amazon blocks Muse from shopping on its site
  • November 11, 2026 - United Airlines bars unauthorised AI agents; a16z publishes "Welcome to the B2A Economy"
  • November 12, 2026 - Mastercard reports a live flight booked and paid for by an AI agent

Summary

Who. Model developers including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Perplexity and Anthropic; payment companies Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and PayPal; commerce platforms such as Shopify; retailers including Walmart, Target and Amazon, which both builds agents and blocks rival ones; and advertisers whose ads agents may or may not see.

What. Purchasing in which AI agents discover products, build baskets and pay for a person within limits that person sets, relying on checkout protocols (ACP, UCP), payment authority schemes (AP2 mandates, ACP allowance tokens, Mastercard and Visa agentic tokens) and agent identity standards (Web Bot Auth, Trusted Agent Protocol).

When. The infrastructure was built from November 2024; card networks entered in April 2025, the main protocols launched between September 2025 and January 2026, and 2026 brought both retreats, such as Instant Checkout's closure in March, and the first live agent-paid flight in November.

Where. Inside chat assistants, AI search, agentic browsers and messaging apps, transacting on retailer sites and through merchant feeds, with deployment concentrated in the United States as of November 2026.

Why. Whoever controls the agent controls the step between intent and purchase. For marketers, agents threaten ad formats priced on human attention and shift competition towards structured product data, while consumer reluctance, merchant blocking, fraud and unsettled liability keep actual agent-completed purchases small.