Tag Archives: google

Retail, Roles and Know Your Agent

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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.

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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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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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eIDAS – Top 3 Problems

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Europe is twelve months away from a legal deadline for a wallet no one has asked for. Governments are required to issue digital IDs, banks are not required and will likely hold off given the success of Norway’s Bank ID model (commercial terms there). Under Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, commonly called eIDAS 2.0, every Member State must offer at least one certified European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet to all citizens and residents by December 2026. The Commission’s stated ambition is that 80% of European citizens use a digital identity solution by 2030.

The wallet is a container. It holds Person Identification Data (PID), the citizen’s legally recognized core identity issued under national authority. It holds Qualified Electronic Attestations of Attributes (QEAAs), which are verified claims such as a driving license, a professional qualification or a bank account identifier. It also supports Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES), which carry the legal weight of a handwritten signature in all 27 Member States. For payments, the relevant consequence is that a certified wallet credential satisfies Strong Customer Authentication, so a bank cannot arbitrarily reject a wallet based authentication event in a payment flow.

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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 Apocalypse — How to Stop It

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Company Spotlight: Delta Network

June 30, 2026

In my recent posts on Agentic Data Battle: Intent and Agentic – Intent and the New Data Games, I’ve emphasized that the trust challenge in agentic commerce goes far beyond authenticating the consumer and the agent. We must verify the action itself (the fourth pillar of any transaction). But no one is willing to budge. Platforms don’t want to give out intent to banks or networks (even with explicity consumer consent), they don’t want to be measured. While networks are the right neutral party, network VAS means loss of control. Today’s blog outlines the hard data on agent intent failure (28%) and best in class example of how to fix it.

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Agentic Data Battle: Intent

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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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Carts and Mandates: Decoupling Discovery, Authentication, and Liability 

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Executive Summary

I just got back from 2 weeks of vacation and catching up on all that transpired. No one reads this blog for its technical depth, but a few browse it for the economic implications and power struggles going on behind the scenes (hence “inside baseball”).

I/O 2026 was last week (see product announcements). The Commerce team showed how Universal Cart, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) would drive a frictionless revolution in digital commerce.  By consolidating products from Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into a single persistent cart, Google is attempting to establish itself as the default transaction and orchestration layer of the internet. While consumers would love to engage across any platform and any retailer from any device…. A universal cart is also necessary for operating across any agentic platform and “specialist”.  Agentic commerce is certainly gaining traction, but Walmart’s Rufas and Amazon’s Alexa also want to play in the game at the front end (so does Open AI)

Wallet expansion to universal cart is great for Google; however, it’s not great for everyone else, as platforms make for poor custodians (i.e., they are not neutral). Particularly when it comes to controlling credentials and measuring their own effectiveness.  My concerns here are shared by retailers, banks, processors and networks as this architecture conceals a profound structural conflict over control and economic value.  Google’s “own-it-all” will create a great customer experience, and allow them to move agentic from the current “conversational commerce to merchant checkout” state, but who wants to invest in a platform where they become disintermediated, or a dumb fulfillment pipe? 

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