Agentic AI agents, autonomous agents that act on behalf of users with minimal input, are not just coming to financial services. They’re already here. One of the most compelling use cases for Agentic AI is at checkout, where commerce, AI, and payments converge at the point where consumers make their purchase decisions.
In the past few weeks, three Agentic AI shopping and checkout announcements from major payments and technology players have made news headlines. So far, Google, Visa, and Mastercard are leading the Agentic AI payments charge, with PayPal, Stripe and Perplexity not far behind. Here’s a look at what each company is doing.
Google’s AI-powered shopping agents
Google announced its AI Shopping Mode yesterday, a new online shopping experience that allows users to browse 50 billion product listings and buy the item they want using Google’s new agentic checkout at a price that fits their budget. Shoppers set their preferences by selecting “track price” on a preferred product listing and set the right size, color, and the amount they want to spend. If the item’s price drops into the user’s pre-selected price range, they receive a push notification and can have the agentic shopping agent buy the item for them with the push of a button.
Google is embedding an AI assistant into every step of the purchasing process, from browsing to payment, and is making the checkout experience hyper-personal, with less friction.
Visa’s intelligent commerce and agentic AI
Visa unveiled its Visa Intelligent Commerce tool last month. The new initiative will empower AI agents to deliver personalized and secure shopping experiences for consumers at scale. The program will equip AI agents to seamlessly manage key phases of the shopping journey, from product discovery, to purchasing, to post-purchase product management.
Unlike Google, Visa will offer APIs and SDKs that will provide third parties a suite of payments tools, including tokenization, authentication, and transaction controls, to embed into their own apps. In this sense, Visa is not just planning to launch a new checkout tool, it is building infrastructure for a world where the AI agent is the end customer.
Mastercard’s agentic payments through Agent Pay
Mastercard announced Agent Pay, a payment framework for agent-driven commerce, 24 hours before Visa’s agentic AI announcement hit the wires. Mastercard’s tool aims to make payments smarter, more secure, and more personal by embedding them directly into the product recommendations generated by GenAI platforms.
When paired with Mastercard’s tokenization technology, Agent Pay will not only add security, but will also help retailers identify and validate customers to offer a more meaningful and consistent shopping experience. Overall, Mastercard is pioneering a payment model where AI, not the consumer, initiates the purchase.
Perplexity x Stripe/PayPal
Earlier this month, GenAI-powered search engine Perplexity partnered with PayPal via a Stripe integration to enable in-chat shopping. Shoppers will be able to check out instantly with PayPal or Venmo when they ask Perplexity to find a product, book travel, or buy tickets. The entire process will be powered by PayPal’s account linking, secure tokenized wallet, and emerging passkey checkout flows, which could eliminate the need for passwords.
While it is not a formal “agentic” platform, the move shows that large language models (LLMs) are starting to transact directly and the partnership is a good example of how chat interfaces are evolving into commerce platforms. The announcement serves as a preview of agentic commerce where LLMs initiate and complete purchases in a single conversational flow.
Overall, these announcements signal a major shift in ecommerce. The online point-of-sale is moving from a consumer-initiated process to an AI-initiated transaction. At the outset, regulation, identity, fraud, and explainability will be a large challenge. Still, the shift to agentic commerce is well underway, and the companies building today’s infrastructure are setting the rules and structure for how agentic AI commerce will work in the future.
Views: 94
