Agentic commerce
Commerce where an AI agent carries out the buying — discovering options, choosing, and paying — instead of a person clicking through a store.
Agentic commerce is the broader shift that agentic payments sit inside: an agent does the shopping. It finds candidates, compares them against what it was asked for, chooses, and completes the purchase. The person sets the intent and the limits; the agent does the work.
It splits along a line worth keeping clear. In consumer agentic commerce an agent buys on a person's behalf, and the hard problem is proving what that person actually authorised — which is what Google's AP2 and the OpenAI and Stripe Agentic Commerce Protocol are each addressing. In machine-to-machine commerce the agent is buying for itself, from other software, and the hard problem is settling small amounts fast without an account.
The two need different infrastructure and are often discussed as though they were one thing. Card rails handle the first reasonably well. They do not handle a thousandth-of-a-cent payment between two programs that met a second ago.
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