Category Archives: Agentic Commerce

Why Banks Are Best Positioned in Intent: Amex Updates ACE to Provide the Model

Posted on by
Reply

Wednesday, American Express published its Intent Intelligence framework, a new core service of the Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit. I covered the ACE launch in April in American Express Breaks the Agentic Commerce Deadlock: Why Today Matters. In April, Amex said it would stand behind agent errors. This week it published how it will know what the agent was supposed to do.

I have written five posts on the problem of intent in machine to machine (M2M) transactions:

One principle runs through all of them: intent data must flow to the party taking the risk. Amex has now published a framework built around the issuer, the party that authorizes the payment, answers the phone and absorbs the dispute (and COULD take on liability).

Continue reading →

Trust, Data, AI and Specialized Agents

Posted on by
Reply

Trust and Governance could turn AI into a powerful force for decentralization, community, and value creation.

This is a big picture blog: my hypothesis on the forces shaping how AI and commerce will evolve. It builds on two posts I return to often. The New Economy: Small Wins (2016) argued for an economy where millions of small businesses thrive. Part 3: Internet 2.5, The Next Wave is Here (2022) argued that trust is the core of networks and commerce, how it changes is the key shaping force in the “next wave”. AI is now testing both ideas at once.

Continue reading →

Retail, Roles and Know Your Agent

Posted on by
Reply

We all accept that agents are a new entity in consumer commerce. We get how technology (AI, MCP and aggregation) can work together to find the best product at the best price. The question for payments is different. What will agents change in payment and risk?

In June I asked Is Know Your Agent (KYA) Really Necessary? and called KYA an orphan signal. Since then the topic has moved into standards work, but only in part. EMVCo’s draft agentic framework “recognizes the emerging need for Know Your Agent capabilities” (EMVCo, “Agentic Payments: Framework for Specifications 1.0,” Draft, Aug 2026). The tools that exist define how an agent identifies itself and acts on behalf of a consumer: AP2 and Verifiable Intent carry the consumer’s credential, the delegated intent (open mandate) and the specific action (closed mandate). KYA itself is far from settled. At the Global Digital Collaboration (GDC) conference in Geneva in September, EMVCo listed Know Your Agent as future work, alongside Intent Services and use cases (EMVCo and FIDO Alliance, “Trusted Agentic Payments,” GDC 2026, Sep 3, 2026). My view has not changed.either banks (In bank owned risk), or merchants (in merchant owned risk) will control what and how the consumer permissioned. The trust in the agent is at a rules level, not a KYC like level.

Continue reading →

Meta’s Muse: The Agent Becomes the Control Point

Posted on by
2

Three weeks ago I argued that Meta would stay upstream as a preference and affinity layer and leave checkout to retailers. Half of that held. Meta is not taking checkout from retailers. But Muse is more than a preference layer. It is an attempt to build a new orchestration point, one that sits between the consumer, the merchant, the wallet, and the payment network.

The shift I am watching is from wallet-centric commerce, where the merchant owns the interaction and presents payment choices, to agent-centric commerce, where the agent orchestrates merchant, wallet, credential, and transaction. If that shift happens at scale, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, banks, and wallets become services the agent can use. Meta owns the consumer relationship and the purchase intent, which is worth more.

Continue reading →

Meta’s AI Move: From Ad Network to Agentic Preference Layer

Posted on by
3

A reader comment last week pushed on the Meta AI question. The short version: Meta isn’t trying to own agentic commerce (a smart play given merchant control), and what they are doing is more interesting than most people are giving them credit for.

The Architecture Is Already Set

First, a quick recap of where we stand. The winning model in agentic commerce is the retailer-owned specialist agent. Walmart’s Sparky, Amazon’s Rufus (now Alexa Shopping), Michaels’ Ask Mike. The merchant keeps checkout, keeps the customer relationship, and keeps the data. They’ve essentially built an intelligence layer inside themselves. Anthropic’s Claude Commerce Agents blueprint, open-sourced in September 2026, formalizes exactly this structure: shopping agents and merchant agents that sit within the merchant’s perimeter, not as a consumer-facing oracle trying to own the relationship.

Continue reading →

Anthropic’s New Agents: Picking the Right Side of the Counter

Posted on by
3

Short blog. Member only post.

On September 2, Anthropic released Claude Commerce Agents, an open blueprint for building shopping agents and merchant operations agents on Claude. Linas Beliūnas has a good writeup of what actually shipped (Claude Commerce Agents: Anthropic’s Bet on Agentic Commerce). My take is simpler than his, and more opinionated.

Anthropic just made the only bet in this market that I think pays off over the next three years. They are not trying to own the consumer. They are trying to be the intelligence layer inside the merchant’s own store, app and back office. Everyone else is still fighting over the gateway.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please . Not a Member? Join Us

EMVCo Enters the Intent Wars

Posted on by
1

September 2026 – VERY VERY LONG Tech Blog on EMVCo’s new Spec

On September 1, 2026, EMVCo published a draft framework that quietly changes the architecture of agentic commerce. The “EMV Agentic Payments — Framework for Specifications” establishes a neutral, interoperable conceptual foundation for managing consumer intent across the entire payment ecosystem. After more than a year of watching proprietary platforms race to own and orchestrate “everything” in agentic, this is the most significant structural move the industry has seen.

I have written about this problem extensively, from Agentic — Intent and the New Data Games to Carts and Mandates: Decoupling Discovery, Authentication, and Liability to Agentic Data Battle: Intent. The core argument has always been the same: without a structure for managing intent, there will be no trust in agentic transactions. EMVCo just read that memo.

Continue reading →

Instinct: Hottest Agentic Assistant – Payments Advantage?

Posted on by
Reply

Short Blog.

Every few months something breaks out of the demo phase and starts showing up in my feed from people whose judgment I trust. This month it is Instinct, a personal assistant out of San Francisco that the WSJ covered on Friday (“The Latest Viral AI Assistant Rocketing Across Silicon Valley,”). It is worth a look, not because it solves agentic commerce (it does not), but because it is the clearest example yet of where agentic actually gets traction first, and it is not where the payments industry has been looking.

The advantages of edge Use Cases and SMS…. the biggest breakthrough is happening in categories where there is no cart at all.

Continue reading →

Agentic Reality: Advertising

Posted on by
Reply

The hype machine behind agentic commerce is at its apex. Every week brings another protocol announcement, another pilot, another prediction that autonomous agents will soon do our shopping for us. For payment executives trying to separate signal from noise, here is the signal: the first real agentic business model is not autonomous checkout. It is advertising.

What Is Actually Working: AI Inside the Retailer

AI is making great strides within the retailer’s own domain. Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky, and Michaels’ “Mike” are conversational agents built by retailers, trained on their own assortment and category expertise, driving basket sizes up over 35% in the best implementations. Amazon told investors that Rufus helped generate nearly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales, with monthly active users up 115% and users 60% more likely to complete a purchase (Bain & Company, “Agentic AI in Retail: How Autonomous Shopping Is Redefining the Customer Journey,” May 2026). Michaels took “Ask Mike” from concept to production in six weeks on Google Cloud, as I covered in Google Pulls Back From “Buy For Me”.

Continue reading →

Google Pulls Back From “Buy For Me”

Posted on by
4

Summary: Refocusing on a Merchant Message as Merchants control these early days of Agentic

Something quietly changed in Google’s agentic commerce story over the last twelve months, and almost nobody has called it out.

As I related in Google I/O 2025 the headline was “Buy for me.” The pitch was clean and consumer facing: AI finds the product, you set the price you are willing to pay, Google watches the market, you confirm, and Google completes the checkout using Google Pay. Google called it agentic checkout. I wrote at the time that the price of entry for merchants was simply adding the GPay button, and that qualified agentic demand would finally give merchants a reason to do it.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please . Not a Member? Join Us