By Shawn Conahan, Chief Revenue Officer, Wildfire Systems
With agentic shopping, the e-commerce shopping cart as we know it will soon disappear, along with the familiar flow of payments during checkout. This coming shift fundamentally inverts the traditional online shopping funnel. Instead of a shopper broadly starting a search for an item (top of funnel), a shopping agent can be given a narrow goal, such as “find me blue Nike Air Force 1s, size 11, under $150,” then instantly scan multiple merchant sources at the bottom of the funnel.
For consumers, this eliminates the frustrating friction of product search and traditional checkout. But while the shopping agent handles the checkout page programmatically, elements traditionally merchandised in the cart, including upsells, add-ons, and payment options like credit cards, Apple Pay, or Klarna, must migrate upfunnel to survive.
Embedded Payments and the Disruption of the Value Chain
Historically, the payments industry has relied on the clear moment of checkout, when consumers explicitly chose a tender and authorized payment. Now that the payment process has become effectively invisible, payment networks are responding strategically. For example, Visa’s Intelligent Commerce initiative embeds its payment network directly into AI tools, enabling shopping agents to make purchases on the user’s behalf with secure, tokenized credentials. Tokenization is already seeing explosive growth: Visa reported that roughly 50% of e-commerce transactions are tokenized.
However, despite these innovations, the embedded environment carries a non-zero risk of disintermediation for existing networks. Shopping agents could seek optimal payment rails in real time, leveraging alternatives like ACH, RTP, crypto, or decentralized identity systems.
The complexity introduced by shopping agents fundamentally alters the transaction model. Amias Gerety of QED Investors proposed an interesting concept: a traditional 4- or 5-party payments structure could expand into an 11-party model, incorporating AI agents at the consumer, acquirer, and merchant levels. This expansion requires payment companies to innovate rapidly, investing in AI-driven authentication and transaction monitoring to handle this new reality efficiently.
Loyalty: the new currency of tender primacy
In an ecosystem where machines interact with machines, agents will prioritize the consumer’s best interests (eg, finding the right product at the best price, described as “alignment.”) Accordingly, they will choose the payment method offering the most value. For payment providers, loyalty becomes exponentially more important for differentiating their tender and being selected during the agent’s decision-making process.
To win this preference, providers must convey consumer benefits like rewards, loyalty currencies, and value to the agent. The technical capacity enabling this real-time data exchange is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that allows AI assistants to access data from multiple complex systems, including merchant inventory and loyalty platforms.
Payment providers can utilize MCP servers or APIs to integrate offers and rewards directly into the execution mechanisms for agent transactions. This capability allows tokenized loyalty points to travel with the customer and be redeemed across merchants and networks, making them more flexible, fungible, and ultimately more beneficial to the consumer.
Recommendations for encouraging agentic adoption
While the technology for agentic shopping is advancing rapidly, mass adoption will take time and require shifts in current consumer perceptions. Additionally, trust must be established across the entire stack—by users, banks, and sellers—as agents gain access to consumer funds. One way to build consumer trust in agentic commerce is to allow users to set an allowance that an agent cannot exceed. Existing networks like Visa and Mastercard are well-positioned to play the essential role of trust broker, mediating liability for compromised or rogue agents.
The findings from our recent consumer shopping trends report titled “The AI Shopping Shift” identified many of the consumer concerns and motivators related to using AI agents for shopping. Based on report data, we recommend payment providers focus on clear value delivery and protections to encourage consumers to trust shopping agents, including:
- Lead with Value and Financial Incentives: Consumers are pragmatic; 86% are motivated by money-saving benefits, and 75% of shoppers who use AI say receiving cashback or a bonus would increase their trust in AI recommendations. Providers should integrate rewards and leverage technologies such as MCP and APIs to surface eligible loyalty rewards and automatically apply discounts or cashback.
- Build Confidence through Protection and Transparency: Trust is fragile, with top concerns including data privacy (49%) and unwanted subscriptions (44%). Payment leaders should address these fears directly by offering fraud protection specifically for AI purchases (a feature favored by almost 1 in 5 respondents) and money-back guarantees. Transparency is also key: 65% of AI users find recommendations less trustworthy if they see ads, emphasizing that monetization must align with consumer benefit.
- Start with Low-Stakes Use Cases: Providers should initially target low-risk, everyday purchases to build confidence in agentic commerce. A majority (61%) of consumers were comfortable delegating purchases under $20 to agents, while comfort levels dropped steeply for transactions over $500 (19%).
- Highlight Safe Personalization and Efficiency: Though saving money was top-of-mind for consumers, 34% of respondents cited time savings as another key motivator. Providers should highlight how embedded payments offer significant time savings during checkout. Furthermore, consumers are willing to share “low-stakes” data, such as preferred brands (40%) and purchase history (33%), to receive better personalization. Payment providers can utilize this consented, safe data to fuel a virtuous cycle of better, more personalized recommendations, which, in turn, builds user trust and encourages greater usage.
Embracing the age of agentic
Payment leaders must recognize that agentic shopping will require a strategic shift, from processing transactions to securing and enhancing agentic AI’s value proposition. By ensuring their tender remains the preferred choice through loyalty offerings, value, and robust trust infrastructure, payments providers can position themselves to lead in the next chapter of digital commerce.
About the Author
At Wildfire Systems, Shawn Conahan develops strategic partnerships with major finance, banking, and fintech companies to enable the creation of new revenue streams and modernize their customer experiences, positioning them competitively for the future of banking and money. He has been an entrepreneur, senior executive and investor in the wireless, technology and Internet industries for over 15 years, having previously built and sold three companies. His industry experience spans digital media, wireless technology, and big data, with a common thread of building platforms with broad applicability.