The next evolution of digital commerce will allow you to start shopping from entirely new touchpoints—not just a retailer’s homepage or a search engine, but through an AI agent. Early pilots show that AI assistants can help consumers discover products, compare options, and, increasingly, make purchases on their behalf.

This shift toward agentic commerce brings new considerations for merchants, including how product discovery and checkout will work, and what it takes to participate and scale in this changing landscape.

Understanding agentic commerce

Agentic commerce represents the next stage of digital commerce. Instead of requiring consumers to manually search, compare and transact across multiple websites, AI agents can help anticipate needs, evaluate options, and execute transactions on a shopper’s behalf.

For example, a shopper may ask an AI agent to restock household essentials within a specific budget and delivery timeframe. The agent then chooses the best merchant across the web and places the order on behalf of the consumer.

As AI becomes more advanced, customers may increasingly delegate more parts of their shopping experience to agents to autonomously act on their preferences.

How agentic commerce is evolving

Most consumers today still begin their shopping journey with a search engine, comparing products by browsing multiple merchant websites to find the right item in their price range. As consumer usage of AI agents has grown, customers have increasingly asked AI shopping questions instead of search engines.

Early agentic AI use cases focused primarily on discovery, with transactions completed separately on merchant websites. The next evolution leveraged ‘web-crawling’ models, where agents navigate merchant websites to complete guest checkout. Now, protocols are emerging to establish direct integrations between agents and merchants.  

While there is a lot of excitement, we believe this journey is just starting. Many of the current iterations of ‘agentic commerce’ are not actually autonomous–meaning agents are just another form of embedded shopping, similar to social commerce.

Agent-embedded commerce will take time to scale–and autonomous shopping, where agents complete purchases without human approval, will take even longer.

What it will take to scale agentic commerce

It took more than two decades to build the digital commerce ecosystem we see today. We believe agentic commerce will evolve more rapidly, but it won’t be at scale tomorrow. Like earlier phases of digital commerce, it will require trust by consumers, clear value for merchants, and transparency for ecosystem participants, including payment providers.

We believe the industry will need to align on standard protocols that enable agents to access merchant product catalogues, inventory, pricing, and post-sale data. From a payments perspective, merchants will likely want to maintain their position as merchant of record and maintain visibility into agent-driven activity to manage risk. A key starting point for merchants will be with clean, accessible and rich product data optimized for agent discovery.

Other open questions across the industry include: “What is the definition of consumer consent in autonomous or human-not-present transactions?”, “What happens when an agent misinterprets a consumer prompt?”, “What should be the data use standards across consumers, merchants, issuers, agents, and other ecosystem participants?”

Common frameworks, developed by industry bodies, networks, or standards organizations, will help ensure agents can interact consistently with checkout and payment systems.

How J.P. Morgan Payments is helping clients

We are actively working with agents, networks, and other industry participants as standards continue to evolve. At J.P. Morgan Payments, our focus is to create solutions that support merchants whether they choose to host their own agents or distribute products through third-party consumer agents. As we develop new solutions and partnerships, our goal is to provide flexibility and broad enablement across the evolving agentic commerce landscape.

We’ve guided merchants through major shifts before, and we’re ready to help them succeed in the era of agentic commerce.

Disclaimers:

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J.P. Morgan, its affiliates, or its employees. The information set forth herein has been obtained or derived from sources believed to be reliable.

Neither the author nor J.P. Morgan makes any representations or warranties as to the information’s accuracy or completeness. The information contained herein has been provided solely for informational purposes and does not constitute an offer, solicitation, advice or recommendation, to make any investment decisions or purchase any financial instruments,and may not be construed as such.

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