AI Agents Want to Shop for You: The Future of Agentic Commerce

Source: Beth LaMontagne; MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (Medium) · 2026-07-13

Understanding the future of agentic commerce and how people will use AI agents to shop on line depends on design, regulations and the collaborations being built between today’s largest business organizations.

Agentic commerce — online shopping managed by AI agents — is poised to change the way we purchase nearly everything from toothpaste to car insurance. Online retailers, AI platforms and credit-card companies are all vying for a piece of the agentic commerce pie. According to McKinsey & Co., by 2030 we could see up to $1 trillion in orchestrated revenue in the retail market alone.

Although agentic commerce is still in its infancy, the technology is advancing quickly and issues are already rising around regulation and trust. As companies build out the mechanisms for seamless shopping, it is unclear how this will be regulated and how soon people will trust that they can hand over their shopping to AI agents.

But to prepare for agentic commerce, businesses will need to move beyond traditional e-commerce models and adopt a new way of doing business, says Bob Hedges, a Digital Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and former Chief Data Officer at Visa. While at Visa, Hedges contributed to a 2025 white paper, “Earning Consumer Trust in the Age of Agentic Commerce,” which examines the state of agentic commerce and the requirements for achieving consumer trust.

“There are formal rules today between banks, merchants and payment networks that outline who has the responsibility to ensure the system works efficiently and address any breakage in the system,” Hedges says. “The rules address what happens in the case of charge-backs, who has liability in a fraud scenario…Today, there is a lot of negotiating as to whether, and how, those rules should apply to AI agent environments.”

In 2024 Perplexity announced a “Buy with Pro” feature with PayPal integration and access to over 5,000 merchants.

Last year OpenAI announced an Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with Stripe, that lets users complete purchases directly within the ChatGPT interface.

Visa is positioning its Intelligent Commerce network as the backbone for agentic commerce, providing “AI-ready cards” with tokenized credentials to a wide range of AI platforms.

Last year Mastercard launched Agent Pay in collaboration with Microsoft, also using tokenization capabilities for security.

Hedges expects other deals will continue to be announced as agentic shopping evolves.

“The companies that have the capabilities to make agentic commerce work are still figuring out the most appropriate business models,” he says.

Created by Anthropic and donated to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation in December 2025, MCP standardizes how an AI agent connects to external tools, data sources and services. In this way, MCP solves “bot sprawl.” Without MCP, retailers would need to build and maintain separate AI systems for every function. Instead, MCP allows a single agent to query multiple backend databases through a unified interface.

This protocol specifically addresses how AI agents can safely participate in commercial transactions. It builds trust through three core mandate types: intent, cart and payment. These mandates are digitally signed statements that define what an agent is allowed to do, such as create a cart, complete a purchase, or manage a subscription. They are portable, verifiable and revocable, allowing multiple stakeholders to coordinate safely.

This approach makes it safe to let an agent spend on your behalf. Rather than giving an AI agent access to a live credit card, the payment method is represented as a tokenized credential. This is a single, specific payment method selected by the credentials provider and confirmed by the user. It’s accompanied by a risk payload containing signals required by merchants, payment processors and issuers.

How will AI shopping agents disrupt certain industries? A recent study by the IDE’s AI, Marketplaces and Labor Markets research group theorizes that AI shopping will lower transaction costs to almost nothing. In their paper, The Coasean Singularity? Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents, in which the authors argue that agent ownership will have a big influence on how agentic commerce plays out.

Under one model — known as the “bowling-shoe” agent — the platform or online retailer builds and maintains the agent conducting the transaction. This type of agent is easy to use and is optimized for a particular environment. But like rented bowling shoes, consumers don’t own it. The paper’s authors argue this creates an incentive to design the agent in a way that benefits the seller or online retailer.

But a “bring-your-own” agent flips that dynamic. User-controlled and portable across platforms, it’s configured around a consumer’s preferences rather than a vendor’s goals, so it works for the consumer regardless of where they’re shopping. However, the paper’s authors argue, a BYO agent may also present consumers with management and configuration challenges, and it may not be compatible with all retailers. There are also the important issues of who pays for the agent and whether consumers will pay directly for an agent’s advice.

At the moment, AI platform-run agents are leading the way by borrowing a business model from digital advertising and search. However, Hedges warns, there is a risk that the tempting economics of advertising and “product placements” will undermine these agents’ objectivity.