When Visa started building for agentic commerce over a year ago, most people had the same mental image: a consumer asking an AI assistant to buy something, never leaving the chat window. It was a clean, simple picture — and for many people in the industry, it’s still the picture today.
The reality, as we’ve seen firsthand, is considerably more dynamic. While large general-purpose AI platforms have commanded most of the industry’s attention, vertical-specific AI surfaces — built for high-end fashion, climate-conscious products, wellness, specialty retail, and dozens of other categories — are where agentic commerce is growing. These platforms are moving quickly, transacting at real scale, and doing so in ways the broader industry isn’t yet fully tracking. That gap between where the spotlight is pointed and where the action is actually happening may be the most important dynamic in commerce right now.
How agentic commerce is evolving — and where
The agentic surfaces we’ve been watching aren’t all conversational. Many look like a perfectly ordinary eCommerce site. They’re placing real orders with real merchants, at scale, using front-end automation or by positioning themselves as the merchant of record and absorbing the transaction entirely.
One example involves a startup driving approximately $10 million in annual revenue to a major beauty brand. The transactions were real. The revenue was real. And the brand had no idea it was happening. The startup was capturing consumer relationships, driving purchase intent, and routing transactions through its own infrastructure while the merchant simply saw orders arriving, with no visibility into the agent layer sitting between their products and their customers.
This isn’t a niche edge case. It’s a structural feature of how early agentic commerce markets develop, and it represents both a significant opportunity and a problem the industry needs to solve before it compounds.
The methods powering today’s agentic commerce are creative, but they’re not durable. Front-end automation — programmatically navigating product pages, filling checkout flows, parsing merchant UIs — breaks with every site update, creates unpredictable consumer experiences, and leaves merchants with unattributed, unverified transactions that introduce fraud risk, policy risk, and brand risk all at once.
Becoming the merchant of record addresses some of those problems but creates others: regulatory complexity, liability exposure, margin compression, and the ongoing challenge of maintaining accurate, real-time product and pricing data across a constantly shifting retail landscape. Neither model holds up as agentic commerce scales from niche activity to mainstream expectation.
Why we need a new trust layer
What’s missing is a trusted, standardized layer between AI agents and merchants that includes the connective infrastructure, standards, and trust frameworks that allow agentic commerce to function with the same reliability and transparency that underpins every other form of digital commerce today. Merchants need visibility into the agent surfaces driving their revenue, while agents need permissioned, accountable pathways to transact on behalf of consumers. And every party in the chain needs the fraud protection, dispute resolution, and trust signals that give them the confidence to participate.
The merchants and platforms at the leading edge are already asking the right questions: Do we know which agent surfaces are driving transactions to us today? Can our payment and attribution systems accurately capture agent-initiated orders? What happens when an agent places an order on a consumer’s behalf and a dispute arises? For agent platforms, the questions are equally urgent: Are we building on infrastructure that scales? Are we establishing merchant relationships that can withstand regulatory scrutiny and rising consumer trust?
What’s next in the agentic commerce evolution
The $10 million revenue story we shared isn’t a cautionary tale — it’s a signal. Consumer appetite for agent-driven commerce is real, agent capabilities are real, and the commercial opportunity is growing faster than most of the industry recognizes. But revenue flowing through channels merchants can’t see is revenue they can’t protect, optimize, or build on.
The infrastructure that makes agentic commerce trustworthy at scale is the most important thing being built in commerce right now, and the question for every stakeholder in the ecosystem — merchants, agent platforms, payment networks, and technology providers — is whether they’ll help build the right foundations or wait for someone else to do it.
For merchants who want to get ahead of this shift, Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect is designed to make you agentic commerce ready today. Rather than navigating agent identity, verification, and fraud exposure on your own, Intelligent Commerce Connect lets you lean on Visa to facilitate agentic checkout with confidence. Agents transacting through Intelligent Commerce Connect are certified by the Trusted Agent Protocol, meaning you’ll know exactly who — or what — is placing an order. And every transaction is backed by Visa’s fraud and risk solutions, giving you the same peace of mind that has made Visa a trusted partner in commerce for decades.
Staying ahead, always of what’s next
Together we can build the infrastructure to support agentic commerce responsibly. If you’re a merchant or agent platform ready to explore what that looks like in practice, we’d love to hear from you.
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