Agentic Commerce Economics and Governance

The “Agentic Era,” promises to revolutionize commerce and customer experience by automating complex purchasing tasks. Agentic’s transformative potential is constrained by the lack of clearly defined shared economic models. 

While the vision of a decentralized Web 3.0 remains unfulfilled, the Agentic Era presents its own set of complex economic questions regarding value creation, distribution, and governance. This blog explores the challenges in establishing shared economic models for agentic commerce by taking a look at Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and Network Theory to analyze the interplay among consumers, merchants, AI agent platforms, and other stakeholders. We address issues of value attribution, data monetization, trust, risk allocation, permissions and the necessity for robust governance structures beyond mere technical interoperability.

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Visa Product Drop – Enabling Agentic 

Today Visa provided products, partnerships and demonstrations of “Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI to find and buy”. This is a very significant effort from Visa that extends their leadership as the payment and identity infrastructure of the internet, to new era of AI and Agentic Commerce. 

What is the new problems it is solving? Payments geeks understand Card Present (CP) and Card Not Present (CNP) transactions, but agents raise the question of WHO authorized the agent and for what purpose?  Visa solves this problem by extending existing facilities like tokenization and FIDO based authentication, with agents receiving finer-grained authorization (from consumer) using limited-use tokens that restrict authorization and consumer control (expiration/time, amount and merchant).   

Within an agentic transaction flow, authentication by the Agent operator is not good enough for the merchant that will bear the risk in the transaction, the merchant must also be able to authenticate the consumer and obtain authorization for the transaction (see Tokens and Binding 101 and Separating Payments and Identity).

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