Some of the largest payments companies in the world are preparing for a future in which consumers entrust artificial agents with routine purchases such as coffee and groceries. But for that to happen, consumers and merchants will need to establish that an AI agent is acting on behalf of a legitimate person or business.
That challenge is at the center of a new collaboration between Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International, which are working on Know Your Agent standards designed to link AI agents to verified parties, evaluate bot behavior, and keep tabs on agent activity.
One objective is to establish interoperability among the various agentic commerce systems that have emerged in recent months. The effort comes as Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International have each separately introduced initiatives and protocols aimed at enabling payments Through AI agents.
Yet to Manifest
The overarching goal is to build trust in a model that has attracted significant attention but has yet to translate that enthusiasm into meaningful payments volume.
“They talk about Know Your Agent, but one of the big questions is who will own the agents?” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “This feels a little like OpenAI’s early releases that talked about a fully integrated agentic commerce stack that included payments, multi-merchant baskets, etc. Anthropic’s recent release that focuses more on product discovery and leaves payments up to merchants better reflects where we are in the whole agentic commerce timeline.”
“OpenAI has since put their agentic commerce platform on the shelf because these companies are realizing that you can’t have commerce—agentic or otherwise—without merchants,” he said. “Unless merchants have something to gain, this whole initiative is DOA.”
Gauging the Adoption Curve
Despite limited adoption to date, payment companies and other industry participants continue to invest in the infrastructure needed to support agentic commerce, citing its potential to reshape how consumers make purchases. Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International pointed to McKinsey research projecting that AI agents could handle $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030.
That projection remains ambitious. For agentic commerce to reach that scale, the industry will need to overcome challenges around trust, security, interoperability, and consumer demand.
“McKinsey’s $3 to $5 trillion projection for agentic commerce within four years is way off base according to our research,” Apgar said. “It’s important to note that agentic commerce doesn’t print money for buyers, either consumers or businesses. Outside of the 3% annual growth in consumer spending, agentic commerce volume is going to be converted from existing purchases—whether in-store or online—and we just don’t see the adoption curve being that steep.”
