Tag Archives: agentic

Meta’s Muse: The Agent Becomes the Control Point

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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.

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

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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.

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EMVCo Enters the Intent Wars

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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.

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Agentic Reality: Advertising

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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”.

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Google Pulls Back From “Buy For Me”

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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.

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Agentic Data Battle: Intent

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Paid Content

Key Friction Point in Agent (M2M) Transactions. Example of why real agentic transactions are 2-3 yrs away. We have a new party in a transaction that everyone needs to trust: the agent. Mastercard/Google Verifiable Intent is a LONG WAY from satisfying the need. It’s a self-attestation (see the Technical Addendum at the end of the Blog).

My prior blogs have focused extensively on the trust challenge in agentic commerce: authenticating the consumer and the agent (the actor). As I discussed in EMVCo and DPCs, financial institutions must verify and authenticate the four pillars of a transaction: the User, the Instrument, the Actor (Agent), and the Action (Payment). Today, I want to dive deeper into the fourth pillar—the Action—and the emerging battle over intent data.

A New Party to the Transaction

For decades, payment transactions have involved a familiar cast: the consumer, the merchant, the issuer, and the network. Each party has well-defined roles, risk allocation, and data flows governed by established rule sets. Agentic commerce introduces a new party: the Agent.

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Can Processors Win a Role in Agentic?

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Adyen’s stock is down over 40% this year. Investors aren’t just punishing one company; they’re repricing the entire processor category as agentic commerce threatens to restructure who controls economics and merchant relationships. The market sees what I’ve been writing about for 18 months: processors are at risk of becoming dumb pipes.

Yesterday, Adyen announced Adyen Agentic a suite of modular APIs encompassing Agentic Feed (product/inventory), Agentic Cart (checkout orchestration), and Agentic Payments (authentication, fraud, tokenization). The positioning is explicit: a “universal translator” that lets merchants integrate once and participate across every agent platform, protocol, and payment method.

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Google Ads in the Agentic Era: Merchant Center Becomes the Center

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Great article in Search Engine Journal surrounding the shift in Google Ads: the product feed is no longer just a catalog. It’s becoming THE primary bidding signal.

This shift matters for payments strategists because it reveals how Google is positioning itself as the orchestration layer for agentic commerce. The advertising infrastructure and the commerce infrastructure are converging, and Merchant Center is the “last mile” integration point to merchant data from store level product inventory, to pricing, to SKU level purchase feeds (for measurement).

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The Power to Price

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The best lever of economic margin for investors to track is power to price. In classical economics, pricing power is not merely a reflection of market share, but rather the capacity of an economic actor to minimize transaction costs while maintaining strategic control over data, risk, and user experience. Historically, eCommerce has operated under a macroeconomic paradigm where merchants absorb the operational and financial frictions of the conversion funnel, while payment networks and processors leverage their scale to price security, identity, VAS and settlement infrastructure.

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Federated Models Need Measurement

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A follow on blog to my Intent data post yesterday. Where intent is needed for authorization, measurement is needed by every “specialist” participating in an agentic interaction. As background I was founder/CEO of Commerce Signals, focused on measurement and card transaction data. Measurement is a powerful business. In fact, I would say Google started out as a measurement company with the PageRank algorithm. By keeping track of what users clicked on which link for which search word, they created the directory of the internet. Let’s dig a little deeper into why measurement is key in agentic, and for all federated models.

Google is not building a monolithic “central brain” to disintermediate the ecosystem. Instead, as discussed in my UCP Blog (also see Ask Macy’s Case Study), they are fostering a world of specialist collaborative models that interact across three specific technical layers:

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