Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal have joined the agentic AI commerce trend, where AI agents assist consumers in shopping and making transactions.
Visa CEO Ryan McInerney mentioned that agentic commerce has the potential to transform how people shop and buy.
The companies are integrating payment capabilities into AI chatbots to allow for both shopping assistance and payment within the same interface.
Visa's Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard's Agent Pay, and PayPal's Agent Toolkit are initiatives in agentic commerce introduced by the companies.
Tokenization plays a crucial role in Visa and Mastercard's approach, creating unique tokens for AI agents to use for purchases with consumer-set controls.
PayPal's approach involves a developer toolkit and access tokens for direct interaction with its platform through APIs.
Agentic commerce is seen as a significant shift in digital retail, with implications for consumers, retailers, and financial institutions.
Retailers must optimize for agentic commerce to ensure their products are recommended by AI agents based on consumer intent.
Consumers can benefit from AI agents saving time and effort in shopping and payment processes, but trust-building is vital for adoption.
Key factors for scaling agentic commerce include a reliable trust layer, transparent boundaries, explainable decisions, and failsafe recourse.