Agentic commerce

Shopping and payments in which an artificial intelligence (AI) agent finds, chooses, and pays for goods or services on behalf of a person or business, with the person setting the goal and the spending limits instead of clicking "buy" themselves.

A person might ask an agent to reorder household supplies when they run low, buy concert tickets the moment they go on sale, or book a flight and hotel within one budget. A business might let an agent renew software licenses.

Commerce in which the party that starts checkout is software acting under delegated authority, which breaks the assumption built into card payments that a human is present at the moment of purchase. It needs three things a human checkout never did: a way for merchants to recognize a legitimate agent, a verifiable record of what the person authorized, and a payment credential the agent can use without seeing the person's card number.

An agent-led purchase usually runs like this:

1. The person sets a goal and limits, captured as an agent mandate.
2. The agent searches, compares, and builds a cart.
3. The agent identifies itself to the merchant, for example with a cryptographically signed request.
4. The agent pays with a scoped credential, such as a payment token limited to one merchant or one cart total.
5. The merchant and card issuer check the request against the mandate, then approve it, decline it, or ask the person to confirm.

Merchants use several methods to tell a legitimate shopping agent from a harmful bot:

• Agent registration and signed requests, where a card network or platform registers the agent and the agent signs each request. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, for example, uses signatures tied to one merchant and purpose that expire and cannot be reused.
• Agent-specific payment tokens, which limit where, how much, and how often an agent can spend.
• Proof of intent, a signed record of the person's instructions that shows what was authorized.
• Behavior monitoring, which catches traffic that claims to be a trusted agent but acts like a scraper or card-testing bot.

Agentic commerce sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Agentic payment protocols are the technical standards that carry these purchases, while agentic commerce is the activity itself.
• Agent mandate is the permission that sets what an agent may buy and up to what limit.
• Know Your Agent (KYA) is the practice of verifying the agent, its mandate, and the person behind it before it acts.
• Bot attack uses automated traffic for abuse, which merchants must tell apart from agents a customer sent.

For more, see What the IMF Got Right About Know Your Agent.