Agentic Commerce
Buying and selling where an AI agent, rather than a human, carries out part or all of the transaction.
What is Agentic Commerce?
Agentic commerce is a model of buying and selling in which an AI agent handles part or all of a transaction on a person's behalf instead of a human clicking through search results, product pages, and a checkout form. A simple example: telling an assistant "reorder my usual dog food when it drops below $30" and having it monitor the price and complete the purchase automatically. It shifts commerce from something a person actively browses to something an agent quietly executes against instructions and limits the person set in advance.
Why it matters
The mechanics of agentic commerce are being standardized through open protocols rather than left to each company to build separately. OpenAI and Stripe co-developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open standard for agent-to-merchant checkout that uses Shared Payment Tokens scoped to a specific merchant and basket so an agent never handles raw card credentials. Separately, Google published the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) on September 16, 2025, which uses cryptographically signed "mandates" (Intent Mandate, Cart Mandate) to prove a user actually authorized a given purchase, and has since been contributed to the FIDO Alliance with backing from Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and 60+ other organizations. McKinsey has estimated the agentic commerce opportunity could reach $3–5 trillion by 2030, though real-world adoption has moved unevenly: OpenAI itself scaled back its own in-chat checkout in March 2026 after low usage, showing the space is still being defined by trial and error.