Agentic commerce arriving
Companies and platforms are building 'agentic' shopping tools where AI agents may eventually complete purchases on behalf of consumers rather than just recommend products. Coverage says businesses should make their product and service information machine‑readable—clear categories, consistent contact details and reviews—to work well inside those systems. (adweek.com, ecommercenews.co.nz, retailcustomerexperience.com)
Shopping bots are moving closer to checkout, not just search results. Visa, Mastercard and American Express are all rolling out tools meant to let artificial intelligence agents find products and handle payment steps for consumers. (visa.com, mastercard.com, adweek.com) Visa introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce on April 30, 2025, saying it opens Visa’s payment network to developers building shopping agents with partners including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Perplexity, Samsung and Stripe. Visa said consumers would set spending limits and preferences, while tokenized credentials replace raw card numbers. (visa.com) Mastercard announced Agent Pay one day earlier, on April 29, 2025, with Microsoft, International Business Machines and checkout firms Braintree and Checkout.com. Mastercard said its system uses “agentic tokens” so an assistant could recommend products, choose a payment method and complete a purchase with issuer visibility and controls. (mastercard.com) An artificial intelligence shopping agent is software that remembers preferences, reasons through options and uses outside tools, such as payment or booking systems, to act. Retail Customer Experience described agentic artificial intelligence in January 2026 as systems that combine memory, reasoning and tool use to act semi-autonomously or fully autonomously across shopping. (retailcustomerexperience.com) The push is happening as more shoppers already use artificial intelligence before they buy. Bain said on November 13, 2025 that 30% to 45% of United States consumers use generative artificial intelligence for product research and comparison, while about half still say they are cautious about fully autonomous purchases. (bain.com) That changes what merchants need to publish online. OpenAI’s commerce documentation says merchants can submit structured product feeds with identifiers, descriptions, pricing, inventory, images and fulfillment details so products can appear accurately in ChatGPT shopping experiences. (developers.openai.com, chatgpt.com) Google has pushed the same basic discipline for years in search and shopping. Its Merchant Center and Search Central documentation tell sellers to add machine-readable product and offer markup so Google can reliably process price, availability and review information, and Google’s product ratings program uses submitted reviews and aggregator data to show star ratings. (developers.google.com, support.google.com, support.google.com) Retailers also face a control problem if shopping shifts into someone else’s assistant. Retail Customer Experience wrote in March 2026 that when discovery, recommendation and checkout happen inside an artificial intelligence interface, retailers can lose feedback data and loyalty touchpoints that used to come from their own sites and apps. (retailcustomerexperience.com) American Express is making the same bet from the payments side. Adweek reported that the company’s developer kit is aimed at making artificial intelligence-driven commerce more mainstream, putting another large card network behind the idea that the next storefront may be a bot that shops first and asks fewer questions later. (adweek.com)
