After the initial buzz around agentic commerce, skeptics questioned whether artificial intelligence agents would ever gain real traction in retail. Yet developments suggest that hesitation may be premature.
Most recently, Visa completed hundreds of AI-driven transactions in pilots of its Intelligent Commerce program and expects rapid consumer adoption of the technology.
The goal of agentic commerce is to take the heavy lifting out of shopping for consumers, enabling agents to perform complex purchases with minimal prompting.
Visa highlighted research showing that roughly 47% of U.S. shoppers currently use AI tools for at least one shopping task, such as product recommendations or price comparisons. From there, the payments giant extrapolated that the AI-powered e-commerce environment could drive millions of consumers to task AI agents with completing purchases by next year’s holiday season.
It remains to be seen whether agentic commerce will gain that much traction so quickly, but momentum is clearly building around the concept. Data from Javelin Strategy & Research indicates that among consumers who have yet used agentic AI tools, 40% may be willing to trust them.
“That’s evidence that they are willing,” Christopher Miller, Lead Emerging Payments Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research told PaymentsJournal. “Will they use it over time? Will they fully change their behavior? We don’t know. But our data suggests that 40% of those people would be willing to expand their usage.”
“Sometimes when you run surveys like these, you see a substantial portion with a categorical unwillingness to use the technology for some reason, whether it’s lack of comfort or distrust of the companies providing it or whatever,” he said. “If we have at this point a high degree of willingness even among those who have not yet used, I think that suggests that there’s room to grow.”
Keeping on Task
While AI has undoubtedly permeated many aspects of the retail experience, there are still challenges to the widespread adoption of agentic commerce. One of the main concerns is ensuring that AI agents carry out instructions accurately and to the user’s satisfaction.
“Merchants, payment processors, and card issuers are all going to think about this in terms of liability and consumers are going to think about it in terms of experience,” Miller told PaymentsJournal. “If they have an experience that doesn’t meet their expectations, that has implications for the growth of this ecosystem.”
“If a consumer doesn’t believe that they’re going to get what they want by delegating authority to choose or to purchase some piece of software that we’re calling an agent right now, they might not use the agent,” he said. “That’s a fundamental limiter on growth here.”
Misinterpretation by the agent or unclear instructions from the user can increase the likelihood of transaction disputes in agentic commerce, especially during its early stages.
Safeguarding the Agents
There are also concerns about the security of agentic transactions, both from error and potential fraud. Organizations face the dual challenge of detecting fraudulent activity while minimizing false positives in this emerging ecosystem.
“We should be expecting situations where criminals are creating fake websites and apps that offer a similar service,” Suzanne Sando, Lead Fraud Management Analyst told PaymentsJournal. “They’re going to try and convince consumers to sign up for what they think is a legitimate agent service and then in turn, they will be giving up a whole host of PII and payment information and data for this particular scam.”
“On top of that, we should be expecting a surge in text and email scams from fraudsters that are impersonating legitimate agent services,” she said. “Not only do we have to worry about fake services, but now we’re worried about the use of generative AI that has already made impersonation scams easy for criminals to commit. I don’t think it’s at all far-fetched to assume that agentic commerce will be affected as well.”
To safeguard these transactions, financial services companies like Visa, Google, and Klarna have launched protocols designed to keep AI agents on task and protected from harm.
Ready to Serve
Questions have also arisen regarding whether demand for agentic commerce is substantial enough to justify the extensive investment the technology has received.
Both Visa and Mastercard have launched agentic commerce platforms that quickly expanded to additional use cases and markets. For example, Visa has worked with more than 100 partners in pilots of its Intelligent Commerce platform and plans to launch pilot programs for Intelligent Commerce in Asia and Europe next year, alongside other global initiatives.
This suggests that more AI agents will be ready to serve consumers next year, whether consumers are fully prepared or not.
“Skepticism is warranted, but this is happening,” James Wester, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, told PaymentsJournal. “If we are saying, ‘I can’t imagine why somebody would do something,’ that shows the limits of our imagination, not the limits of where this is going to go.”
“Approaching this with an open mind and understanding that there is going to be an entire industry of developers, systems integrators, and folks that are going to be aimed at this (is important),” he said. “It’s understanding that this is bigger and important, and we need to understand that in the context of our entire industry, as opposed to just saying this seems like a lot of hype.”
