Agentic commerce is approaching an awkward transition point in its adoption cycle. The artificial intelligence (AI) foundation is getting good enough to shop for consumers faster than the commercial system responding to it is getting comfortable letting it buy.

“The searches are already happening,” Gaurang Shah, executive vice president, Global Acceptance and Merchant Solutions at Mastercard, said during a conversation hosted by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. Consumers are experimenting with agents because “the access is very easy,” he said. But today, “they are definitely stopping at the recommendations.”

The next generation of agentic payments will need to move more than money. It will need to move proof. Consumers generally expect protection if something goes wrong. Merchants may have a different view of where responsibility should sit when an agent initiates the transaction.

“The consumer though has the baseline expectation that they’re protected. Whatever happens, they’re going to be protected,” Webster said. “And the merchants feel that liability should rest with whoever the agent broker is.”

Shah described the challenge facing the marketplace as a “trust equation” between consumers allowing agents to transact and merchants agreeing to accept those transactions.

A merchant needs to know whether the agent reaching its checkout is legitimate, whether the consumer authorized it, what the agent was permitted to do and potentially whether the transaction remained within those parameters.

Webster noted that consumers are already using AI for “discovery, ranking, compare,” before returning to familiar destinations to complete the purchase. That means the customer journey can begin migrating away from merchant-owned channels even before merchants formally participate in agentic commerce.

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