IntelliPay is a PCI DSS Level 1 payment processor serving government agencies, healthcare providers, and businesses across the United States. This article looks at where agentic commerce stands in 2026 and what merchants should actually do to prepare. Learn more about IntelliPay's payment platform.
By Dale Erling | IntelliPay | 15+ years in payments and fintech | May 2026
Quick Read
AI agents can now help initiate — and in limited, controlled cases complete — purchases on behalf of consumers, without a conventional merchant checkout flow.
- Visa, Mastercard, and Google are all building agentic-payment infrastructure now, and McKinsey puts the eventual market at $3 to $5 trillion by 2030.
- It isn't a mainstream sales channel yet — several agentic flows today still involve a human confirmation step somewhere along the way.
- The standards (Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay, Google UCP, AP2) are being written this year, not finalized.
- Merchants who get their fraud tools, product data, and processor relationships in shape now will have a head start once adoption actually moves.
I've spent fifteen years in this industry watching new technology get overhyped and underdelivered more times than I can count. This one is moving fast, but it's worth being precise about what's actually happening versus what's still aspirational.
Agentic commerce is a transaction that an AI agent starts, and in some cases finishes, for a person, under spending rules set up in advance. Say someone tells their assistant: "reorder my coffee subscription when I'm low, don't spend more than sixty bucks." The agent tracks inventory, picks the product, and pulls a saved payment method. Depending on the platform and the merchant, that might close automatically, or it might still route back to the person for a final confirmation before the payment goes through — plenty of live implementations today work that second way, not the fully autonomous way.
This has already happened on real infrastructure. Banco Santander and Mastercard announced in March 2026 what they called Europe's first end-to-end payment executed by an AI agent on production systems. Visa says it had already logged hundreds of agent-initiated transactions with partners by late last year.
What changes for you isn't just who's clicking "buy." Your checkout flow, your fraud rules, and your authorization logic were built with a human shopper in mind. An AI agent may not produce the same behavioral, device, or session signals that your existing fraud tools expect from a person — that's the gap worth paying attention to, not a claim that agents leave no signal at all.
How big this could get
McKinsey projects $3 to $5 trillion in global agentic transaction volume by 2030. Bain separately projects $7 trillion in embedded payments across all channels for 2026, with agentic flows as the fastest-growing slice.
Visa's own research found 47 percent of U.S. shoppers already use some AI tool for shopping — price comparisons, deal hunting, recommendations. Adobe reported that generative-AI traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 4,700 percent year over year in July 2025, though from a very small starting base. More recent Adobe data shows that growth continuing, at lower year-over-year rates — 393 percent in Q1 2026 and 269 percent in March 2026 — as the channel has matured. That growth makes it worth distinguishing legitimate AI-referred shoppers and approved agents from malicious automation like card testing, rather than treating every automated hit on your site as suspect or every one as safe.
If you take consumer payments online — healthcare, insurance, property management, utilities, retail — this is an infrastructure decision for this year, not a trend piece for next year.
Three companies, three protocols
Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, announced October 2025, is designed to provide every AI agent with a cryptographic identity. When an agent initiates a purchase, it presents that credential, and the framework is meant to let a merchant verify it against Visa's system as part of confirming the purchase was authorized. Visa has announced AI platforms including Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral, OpenAI, and Perplexity as participants, along with processing partners including Nuvei and Adyen, and says the protocol is built to work alongside OpenAI's own Agentic Commerce Protocol.
Mastercard Agent Pay rests on two pieces: Agentic Tokens, 16-digit tokens tied to a real card but scoped for agent purchases, and Verifiable Intent, which Mastercard describes as a tamper-resistant record of a user's authorization. Mastercard's CEO told analysts in October 2025 the company had completed its first agentic transaction. In March 2026, Mastercard and Google jointly developed an open authorization standard, with Worldpay, Fiserv, Checkout.com, and Adyen announced as participants. Google has since contributed its related AP2 mandate format to the FIDO Alliance for stewardship.
Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, announced at NRF in January 2026, is intended to let shoppers check out from participating retailers inside Google AI Mode or the Gemini app. Etsy, Shopify, Target, Wayfair, and Walmart are among the announced retail participants, with Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, and Visa named as payment partners. A merchant who isn't discoverable inside Google's AI surfaces risks being invisible to a growing share of AI-assisted shoppers.
| Protocol | Organization | Primary function | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) | Visa | Agent identity and message verification | AI platforms, merchants, and processors announced by Visa |
| Agent Pay | Mastercard | User-intent verification and agentic-payment enablement | Mastercard ecosystem and integration partners |
| Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) | Common commerce layer across AI surfaces, merchants, and providers | Announced retailers, platforms, and payment providers | |
| Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) | Originally Google; now stewarded by the FIDO Alliance | Protocol approach for trusted agent-payment mandates | Industry participants and technical contributors |
Partner rosters for each protocol are still growing and change frequently — check each network's own announcements for the current list before making integration decisions.
Discoverability signal
ChatGPT accounted for roughly 1 in 5 of Walmart's referral clicks in August 2025.
Referral traffic overall was still a small share of Walmart's total visits (per Similarweb data reported by Modern Retail), but it shows how quickly an AI surface can become a meaningful discovery channel for a merchant with clean product data.
The security problem
You can no longer assume a human is on the other end of every checkout. The growth in AI-driven traffic is already forcing merchants to sort legitimate shopping agents from bots running card-testing or synthetic-identity schemes.
The industry's answer is something people call "Know Your Agent" — Visa's cryptographic identity and Mastercard's Verifiable Intent record both exist to help confirm an agent is legitimate and that a purchase was actually authorized. The Federal Reserve flagged AI-enabled fraud as a growing concern in its 2025 payments symposium, and about three-quarters of respondents in a recent Association for Financial Professionals survey said their companies had dealt with real or attempted fraud in the past year.
Some fraud tools lean on behavioral signals — device characteristics, mouse movement, typing cadence, session behavior — to catch anomalies. Agent-originated or programmatic traffic can produce very different patterns than a human shopper, so it's worth confirming with your fraud provider how your current controls classify automation, velocity spikes, account takeover attempts, and card-testing activity, rather than assuming your existing rules already cover it.
What merchants should do now
You don't need to replace your payment stack to prepare for this. You do need a clear picture of where your payment, product, fraud, and authorization processes might be exposed to new forms of automated purchasing.
- Confirm processor readiness. Ask your processor, gateway, acquirer, and fraud provider which agentic-commerce standards they monitor or support today — Visa TAP, Mastercard Agent Pay, UCP, and AP2 by name.
- Improve your product data. Keep product pages, feeds, inventory status, pricing, and structured data accurate. AI-driven discovery depends on information systems can interpret consistently.
- Review your bot and fraud controls. Confirm your velocity rules, card-testing protections, account-takeover controls, and fraud scoring can actually distinguish approved automation from malicious automated activity.
- Review your customer authorization language. Work with counsel and your processor to assess how delegated purchasing, stored credentials, recurring billing, and explicit customer consent apply to your specific business model — the right approach depends on your network rules and merchant category, not a one-size clause.
- Evaluate your payment-method coverage. Maintain the payment options your customers expect — cards, ACH where appropriate, digital wallets, and other supported methods. Agentic systems may eventually factor supported payment options into their recommendations.
- Document your integrations. Agent-enabled commerce can rely on product feeds, structured data, APIs, approved commerce protocols, or browser-like experiences, depending on the platform. Inconsistent product data and thin developer documentation can limit your ability to participate as these channels mature.
An honest read on the timeline
The market is still early. Some agentic-commerce experiences today are limited to participating merchants, specific platforms, or transactions that still require a consumer confirmation step rather than running fully autonomously. Javelin Strategy and Research put it plainly in their late-2025 analysis: agentic commerce "has not had much impact yet" outside back-office automation, and mainstream consumer purchasing through agents is more realistically a 2027-or-2028 story.
The protocols, the partnerships, and the pilot transactions are all real. What isn't here yet is the mass consumer shift that would make agentic commerce a primary sales channel for most businesses. That's more a readiness issue for 2026 than an immediate replacement for a conventional online checkout — and every major network is building this infrastructure now, so the merchants who prepare during this build phase will have an edge once adoption actually moves.
Frequently asked questions
Is this actually happening, or still theoretical?
It's happening, at small and often human-confirmed scale. Santander and Mastercard ran a live end-to-end agent payment in March 2026; Visa had logged hundreds by late 2025. Most analysts still put mass adoption two to three years out.
Do I need to rebuild my payment stack for this?
No. Start with a conversation with your processor about protocol support, your fraud thresholds, and your API access. Nothing above requires ripping out your current setup.
Will smaller merchants get left out if the big platforms dominate agentic checkout?
Possibly, if you're not discoverable to agents at all — that's the bigger risk, more than being excluded from any one platform. Clean product data and integration documentation matter more here than company size.
Does IntelliPay support agentic payments today?
Not yet, and I'd rather say that plainly than oversell it. What we offer is a flexible, PCI DSS Level 1-certified platform handling in-person, online, mobile, and recurring payments from one system, built to integrate with new rails as these standards mature. If you want to talk through where your current setup stands, reach out at intellipay.com/contact.
The bottom line
Agentic commerce isn't a mainstream channel yet, but the infrastructure being built this year will determine who's ready when it is.
Clean product data, updated fraud controls, clear authorization language, and a broad payment mix are the practical starting points — not a rebuilt payment stack.
To review your current payment infrastructure, visit IntelliPay.
Sources and further reading
- IMF Staff Note, How Agentic AI Will Reshape Payments, Volume 2026, Issue 004.
- Payments Dive, Visa, Mastercard Jockey to Set Agentic Standards, March 2026.
- Digital Transactions, Visa Predicts Agentic Commerce Will Be Mainstream in 2026, December 2025.
- McKinsey & Company, agentic commerce sizing, cited in Payments Dive and industry reporting (2025–2026).
- Payments Dive, Visa, Mastercard, ACI and Wex: 2026 Predictions, January 2026.
- PaymentsJournal / Javelin Strategy and Research, The 3 Key Trends That Will Shape Merchant Payments in 2026, November 2025.
- Oscilar, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and the Future of Agentic Commerce, March 2026.
- Digital Commerce 360, How Visa and Mastercard Are Approaching Agentic Commerce, April 2026.
- Payments Dive, How Payments Will Evolve: 6 Industry Trends to Watch in 2026, January 2026.
- Payments Dive, Charting 2026 Payments Trends, January 2026.
- Forrester, Agentic Payments in B2C Commerce: Where We Are Now, April 2026.
- Adobe Analytics, generative-AI retail traffic data, reported July 2025 and Q1 2026.
- Similarweb data reported by Modern Retail on ChatGPT referral share of Walmart traffic, August 2025.
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or compliance advice. Payment technology standards, card network protocols, and regulatory requirements in this space are changing quickly. Merchants should consult qualified legal counsel and their payment processor before making changes to payment infrastructure or authorization policies. Information reflects conditions as of the date of publication.
