Agentic commerce

Agentic commerce means an AI agent that searches, compares, books and pays for a person or a company. You tell the agent what you want in a sentence. The agent does the shopping and completes the payment.

Here is how it works. The person tells the agent what to buy and sets limits, such as a budget. The agent searches several shops or sites and compares the options. It picks one that fits the limits and places the order. It pays, and sends the person the confirmation.

For this to work, two new things are needed.

First, the agent needs shops that it can read. A website is built for people to look at, with pictures and buttons. An agent works better when the shop gives it a list of products, prices and stock in a form that software can read. Online shops are now building this alongside their normal pages.

Second, the agent needs proof that it was allowed to spend. When a person pays, an OTP or a UPI PIN proves that they approved the payment. An agent cannot type your PIN. So agentic payments give the agent its own token, with its own spending limit. If something goes wrong, only that token is cancelled.

Take, for example, a request typed in one sentence: "Book me a train to Jaipur on Saturday morning, under ₹1,500." An AI trip planner can find the seat, book it and pay.

Consider a household that runs low on rice every month. An AI assistant for households can notice this and reorder the rice from the usual shop.

Inside a company, for instance, procure-to-pay software lets an agent compare three suppliers' quotes for printer paper and raise the purchase order.

How is agentic commerce different from paying with a card saved on a shopping app? With a saved card, you still choose the product and press Pay yourself. In agentic commerce, the agent chooses and pays, so the shop and the bank must check that you allowed it. Fraud detection must also learn to tell a permitted agent from a criminal's bot. Most of this is still being built, and the safety rules are described in AI agent guardrails.