Tag Archives: Agentic Commerce

Visa CLI and X402 CONVERGENCE

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Last week I wrote about MPP and x402 solving the internet’s original sin: the inability of machines to pay machines without a human in the loop. This week, Visa made that argument a lot easier to make.

Visa Crypto Labs quietly launched Visa CLI, a command line tool that gives AI agents a wallet. One npm install. One setup command. And your agent can pay for anything on the internet, charged to a real Visa card, without an API key, without a pre-funded crypto wallet, without human intervention.

I got beta access this week and tested it. Here’s what I learned, and why I think the CLI is the most important signal yet that the incumbent payment networks are serious about the agentic commerce era.

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The Evolution of Checkout: Invisible, Instant, and Everything In Between

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My friend Simon Taylor at Fintech Brainfood published a provocative piece this week: The Checkout is Dead, Part 2. His thesis is elegant — the future of agentic commerce is invisible. No cart. No confirmation screen. No “Pay Now” button. Just an event in the world, and money moves.

IMHO He’s right about the general direction. But he’s wrong about the scope and timeline. Not everything fits in instant, and its really important to look not only at OpenAI’s instant checkout FAILURE at Walmart, but also their internal success (ie Sparky driving 35% sales increase with internal checkout).

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MPP Test – Demonstrating Significance: Phase 1 is Live

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For over 60 years we have been focused on human-centric communication in our networks. While we still have payment problems in this interaction, a whole world is evolving where machines interact with other machines. The scale of this interaction is limited by value exchange — after all, who wants to spend resources answering a bot’s question if they are just stealing your data and delivering no new customers (see this blog covering Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s comments).

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Amazon vs Walmart: Two Very Different Bets on Agentic Commerce

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Amazon and Walmart are the two dominant forces in US retail. They are also taking fundamentally different approaches to agentic commerce — and those differences will shape how payments, checkout, and consumer trust get redesigned over the next three years. This divergence has direct implications for card networks, payment processors, authentication infrastructure, and anyone building for the future of checkout.

Amazon: Closed Stack, Agentic Inside-Out

Amazon is building agentic commerce from the inside out — embedding AI agents deep into its own proprietary infrastructure and deliberately keeping external agents at arm’s length. The strategy is control through ownership.

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UCP Enables a New Economy

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Yesterday, Google’s CEO unveiled Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at NRF.  UCP represents a defining moment in the architecture of digital commerce; the strategic imperative is no longer merely about organizing the world’s information but about organizing the world’s commercial intent and empowering merchants to leverage their own data to construct superior customer experiences.  This shift is not incremental; it is a fundamental re-platforming of the digital economy, where Google is uniquely positioned to serve as the orchestrator within a “virtuous cycle” of interaction among retailers, consumers, and intelligent agents. 

“For many people, discovery is the fun part of shopping. Making a decision is where things get harder. As an indecisive shopper myself, I’m looking forward to the day when agents can help me get from discovery to purchase.

At Google, we’re busy laying the groundwork for this agentic ecosystem to work well. That includes building a common language for these systems and services to talk to each other.

As a next step we are introducing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), designed for the era of agentic commerce. It was built to meet the needs of retailers AND customers, keeping the full customer relationship front and center — from the moments of discovery to decision and beyond”. – Sundar Pichai NRF – Jan 11 2026

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Commercial Models for AI Agents

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Short Blog.. but core to a new series that will attempt to address this strategic question

I find it hard to believe that anyone could keep up with the daily technical updates in AI, the pace of innovation is truly astounding. Given the completion of my recent agentic commerce survey, I thought I’d provide a few of my thoughts on the uncertainties surrounding the economics associated with AI agentic architectures.  While the technology is fascinating, the market operation of AI and Agents is nascent. How is value measured? How will it be monetized?  Who has the pricing power?  How will this impact existing markets, systems and participants? My perspective here is based upon my experience in networked businesses, but even more so in measurement (as CEO/Founder of Commerce Signals).

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