Agentic commerce is shopping where an AI agent — a chatbot or voice assistant — completes the purchase for you, from browsing to payment to order confirmation, without you ever opening a merchant’s website. Instead of an AI just recommending a product and handing you a link, it fills the cart, checks out, and hands you a receipt, all inside the same conversation.

What makes it “agentic”

Most shopping chatbots have always been able to describe products. What changed is that an AI agent — software that can act on a goal across multiple steps, not just answer a question — can now also hold the money-moving part of the transaction: selecting a size, applying a payment method, and submitting the order. The shift from “tell me about it” to “just buy it” is what separates agentic commerce from ordinary AI shopping assistants.

How the payment actually works

Handing a purchase to software raises three practical problems: proving the user actually authorized this specific purchase, proving the agent’s request reflects what the user really wants, and establishing who is responsible if something goes wrong. A handful of new technical standards exist to answer those questions.

OpenAI and Stripe (later joined by Meta) built the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open specification that lets a chat assistant create a checkout session, manage a cart, and pass along a payment credential without ever seeing the buyer’s actual card number. Under ACP, Stripe issues a one-time “shared payment token” that ChatGPT can use to trigger a payment; the merchant still approves the order and handles fulfillment exactly as before.

Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), announced in September 2025 with more than 60 partners including Mastercard, PayPal, and Coinbase, takes a similar goal further with cryptographically signed “mandates”: an Intent Mandate records what the user asked for, a Cart Mandate locks in the exact items and price the user approved, and a Payment Mandate authorizes the charge. Chained together, the mandates create an audit trail of who agreed to what.

Separately, the card networks built their own agent credentials: Mastercard’s Agent Pay issues “Agentic Tokens” that tie a card to one agent, one merchant, and one consent policy, while Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol issues each agent a verified digital identity that merchants can check before accepting an order. None of these standards has become the single universal one yet — a shopper’s experience today depends on which protocol the assistant and the merchant both happen to support.

Where you can already use it

The clearest live example is Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT, which lets US users buy from Etsy sellers and a growing list of Shopify merchants without leaving the chat, using the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Voice assistants are following the same path: Alexa+ has begun testing “agentic ads” that let a shopper go from hearing an ad to finishing an order — ordering food or buying concert tickets — entirely by talking to the assistant.

Why it matters

For shoppers, agentic commerce promises less friction: no forms, no re-entering a card number, no switching apps. For merchants, it opens a new sales channel that lives inside someone else’s chat interface — but it also means giving up some control over how a product is presented, since the agent decides what to say and the checkout screen is no longer the merchant’s own. For the payments industry, it means a rush to define who is liable when an agent buys the wrong size, the wrong ticket, or something the user never actually wanted — which is exactly what the mandate and token systems above are trying to settle in advance.

In the news

Amazon’s rollout of agentic ads for Alexa+ is one of the first mainstream tests of this idea outside of ChatGPT: see our report on Alexa+ Agentic Ads.

FAQ

Can an AI agent buy something without my permission? No reputable system is designed to. Every current protocol requires an explicit user approval step — of a cart, a price limit, or a specific rule — before an agent can charge a payment method.

Do I need a special app to use agentic commerce? Not for the examples live today — it works inside ChatGPT or Alexa+ directly; no separate checkout app is required.

Is my card number shared with the AI company? Under ACP and AP2, the assistant handles a one-time token or signed credential rather than the raw card number, which stays with the payment processor or card network.

Sources: Stripe & OpenAI, Agentic Commerce Protocol documentation; Google Cloud, Announcing the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2); Amazon Ads, Alexa+ Agentic Ads.