Agentic Reality: Advertising

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

MPP Phase 2 Live – Ask Tom Goes Agentic

Long blog – First 2 Pages are economic implications, last 6 pages are tech deep dive

MPP is a big deal because value exchange enables specialization and market forces to operate (as discussed in last week’s MPP – Addressing the Internet’s “Original Sin”.MPP and X402 are BIG.. really big. A whole new market. This isn’t about cash replacement or taking share from xx this is about enabling a new Economy. Today’s blog is 4 paragraphs of the economic implications (for investors and CEOs), followed by 4 pages on tech detail covering what I built. Please note “Ask-Tom” is just a model of an x402 service…. of course it won’t generate much demand (service ID is at bottom).

First, let me try to explain why this is such a big deal from an economic perspective. The foundational driver for MPP’s success is the radical reduction of transaction costs through standardized commercial terms. As outlined in my 2016 blog Small Wins, the forces that once drove asset-heavy, integrated organizations are atrophying in favor of “refragmentation” and specialized networks. Historically, the economic cost of inking a bilateral contract for every micro-interaction was prohibitive (ex “Account Creation” bottleneck that stifled agentic autonomy). Following the principles of Ronald Coase’s Transaction Cost Economics, MPP and x402 provide the multilateral governance and common commercial rules necessary to bypass these friction points. By establishing trust and speed through a common interface, these protocols allow for the “Small Win” of a single transaction to scale into a global network effect, where the cost of connection approaches zero.

This standardization enables the “Value Assembly” of “super-specialists” who can target previously unreachable “shale deposits” of niche market demand (see Network Effects and Value Assembly). A successful network enables specialists like “Ask-Tom” to provide high-value, grounded intelligence without the overhead of building independent settlement or reconciliation infrastructure. This is far beyond mere “agentic commerce”; it is an evolution in how software and hardware interact with EVERYTHING ECONOMICALLY. For example, MPP’s session-based economics provides a virtual “bar tab” for agents to execute tasks within human-granted budgets, paying only for precise resource consumption. This creates a sustainable commercial model where the incentives for specialization and market forces to operate on software service at a hyper granular level. Market forces in turn encourage specialists to solve increasingly granular problems across diverse domains, and unlocks the “shale deposits” of data that doesn’t play. I’ll discuss what this could look like next week as a follow up to Value Assembly.

Continue reading

Machine to Machine Transactions: How to Resolve Trust and Governance Gaps. 

FIDO, VC, AP2, Tokenization, Credential Issuance, Biometrics, …etc

Executive Summary

The transition to agentic, machine-to-machine (M2M) commerce creates a profound governance gap that existing technology-first standards cannot fill. Today, human-in-the-loop (HIL) transactions, whether at a point-of-sale or in eCommerce, are secured not by technology alone, but by the robust, contract-based governance and risk-allocation models of networks like Visa and Mastercard. As stated previously, V/MA are the identity infrastructure for the internet and identity is the core “shaping force” for all new payment schemes.

Continue reading