Latest news with #agenticcommerce
Associated Press
6 days ago
- Business
- Associated Press
Agentic Commerce Will Reshape Payments; Javelin Strategy & Research Outlines the Road Ahead
SAN FRANCISCO, June 03, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Javelin Strategy & Research, part of the Escalent Group, launched Here Come the AI Agents–Agentic Commerce: The Javelin 360 View, a first-of-its-kind bundled report that unites insights from across eight of Javelin's payments research areas. Agentic commerce is poised to reshape the future of payments as intelligent agents begin to take over decision-making and transactions for consumers. These digital tools act on a user's behalf to handle purchases and everyday tasks, raising urgent questions and prompting a need for evolution across the payments ecosystem. Amid the headlines celebrating the rise of AI-powered agents, Here Come the AI Agents takes a more grounded view. The series explores not just what's possible but also what's practical, highlighting the infrastructure, identity authentication, and regulatory hurdles that must be overcome before agentic commerce becomes mainstream. As major players like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal unveil early capabilities, this report helps industry leaders separate signal from noise and prepare for what's next. 'The industry is making it appear as if the future has arrived, packaged like a fancy carbon fiber bicycle with every available feature,' said Jordan Hirschfield, Director of Prepaid Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. 'In reality, agentic commerce is still in its early stages and needs transactional training wheels.' This report was developed for payments leaders, issuers, merchants, and technology providers seeking to understand how agentic commerce will affect their business holistically. Drawing on expertise from eight research areas—Emerging Payments, Prepaid Payments, Credit Payments, Merchant Payments, Technology & Infrastructure, Digital Assets & Cryptocurrency, Commercial & Enterprise Payments, and Fraud Management—the report provides a comprehensive and unified view of this nascent and evolving landscape. Key questions discussed in the series include what types of payment solutions agentic commerce will require, how existing rails might adapt, and where new models like stablecoins fit in. The report also explores how evolving roles, regulatory clarity, and identity verification will shape adoption of agentic commerce across the payment stack. 'Lurking behind all of the fanfare is the bigger claim that agentified commerce represents something different from plain old commerce or the more recent e-commerce,' said Christopher Miller, Lead Emerging Payments Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research. 'The implication is you must act and everyone must adopt or die. But the reality is more granular than that, requiring thoughtful analysis and a strategic approach.' To access the Here Come the AI Agents report, please contact our team directly. About Javelin Strategy & Research Javelin Strategy & Research, part of the Escalent Group, helps its clients make informed decisions in a digital financial world. It provides strategic insights to financial institutions including banks, credit unions, brokerages and insurers, as well as payments companies, technology providers, fintechs and government agencies. Javelin's independent insights result from a rigorous research process that assesses consumers, businesses, providers, and the transactions ecosystem. It conducts in-depth primary research studies to pinpoint dynamic risks and opportunities in digital banking, payments, and fraud & security. Learn more at Contact Allison Bondi [email protected]
Forbes
24-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Agentic Commerce (A-Commerce) Do Not Work Without Agent Identities
Audience at the Featured Session "The Auto-Evolving Business: AI's Agentic Near Future" during SXSW ... More Conference & Festivals at the Austin Convention Center on March 10, 2025 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Diego Donamaria/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images) We all know that agentic commerce is coming at us quickly and agentic commerce will of course mean that agentic finance is inevitable. The smart money is already looking in this direction. For example: Catena Labs has announced an $18 million financing round led by a16z crypto and its plan to establish the first fully regulated AI-native financial institution designed to serve the unique needs of the emerging AI economy. In my view, initiatives like this make agent identities a priority for fintechs. Catena's Sean Neville, who previously co-founded Circle and invented the USDC stablecoin, says that shortcomings in legacy systems make them poorly suited to the needs of agentic commerce and he specifically notes the inability to handle agent identity as a key issue. I have to say I agree with him wholeheartedly about this, and also see his view that agents will soon conduct 'most' economic transactions as far from hyperbolic. And I am not the only one. Craig De Witt, from Skyfire (who are building agent-agent infrastructure) makes a similar point: 'AI has payment and identity requirements that are different from anything we've seen before". He goes to talk about the paradigm shift here, meaning that we are looking at an entirely new approach to how agents will access and pay for services. That point about the digital identity of agents is, I think, central to developing a functioning agentic finance ecosystem. Ravi Loganathan from Sardine summarises some of the problems, asking The race is on to solve these problems as agentic commerce heads to the mainstream, for the obvious reason that if they are not addressed then our commerce infrastructure will be vulernable to agentic fraud on overwhelming scale and trying to fight it using the techniques of a previous era will be like cavalry charges against tanks. Or, for that matter, tanks against drones. Robot wars redux. Earlier this year, payments guru Tom Noyes wrote that identity and authorization will be key to to agentic commerce, with digital wallets as the means for organising and permissioning agent actions, and highlighted the key role of the payment networks in the mainsteam. Well, in the space of a few days last month, Visa launched "Visa Intelligent Commerce', Mastercard launched 'Agentic Tokens' and PayPal launched the 'PayPal Agent Toolkit', all with the general purpose of giving AI agents the ability to pay for purchases and bookings on behalf of consumers. That point about granular access is at the heart of these announcements. They will offer agents payment tokens (rather like the tokens in you xPay wallet) that have tight restrictions so that your agent can only use them in certain merchant categories and with certain payment limits (eg, a token that can be used for travel but only up to $1000 per month, or whatever). (PayPal in fact went even further. At its 2025 Dev Days event, the company announced not only a toolkit for AI agents but a Financial Operating System Financial OS tailored specifically for those agents—autonomous software that can browse, buy, negotiate, refund, and optimize transactions for users—to meet the needs of a future described by Jeremiah Owyang, partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, as a world run by AI agents in which websites may become obsolete and where 'the interfaces of the future are conversations, not clicks.') I see these initiatives as starting points rather than complete solutions. In time, we need a more comprehensive infrastructure to deliver safe and secure agentic commerce. One way to think about this is in terms of the necessary Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for the new world of agents. You are almost certainly familiar with the concept of DPI and the link between an effective DPI and the wider economy, but if not, a quick primer: The World Bank identifies DPI's core functions as digital identity, digital payments and data sharing. These essential features support more efficient public and private-sector applications to improve outcomes for citizens (across health, social welfare, financial services, business and beyond). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) say that DPI has the potential to support the transformation of the economy and support inclusive growth. They highlight the particular example of India's foundational DPI, the so-called "India Stack' , and show how it has been harnessed to foster innovation and competition, boost financial inclusion and improve government revenue collection. Payments are an easy place to start. I've written before that with AI systems becoming increasingly agentic business-to-robot-to-consumer (B2R2C) commerce about to explode, and it is a natural evolution for AIs to become economic actors in their own right and to exchange value in return for services. Bots paying other bots are a new frontier for the payments industry that needs new rails. Data exchange is desirable because among other things to do with productivity and efficiency, in the finance sector it is vital as (to use McKinseys framing) "a critical enabler of financial inclusion'. Open financial data can create economic value by benefiting financial institutions, individuals and businesses in many ways. For example, open data sharing can enable customers (or, more likely, customers' agents') to buy and use financial services they might not be able to otherwise access. The future economy, however, is about agents as much as it is about businesses and consumers (the ABCs, if you like) and these will need a DPI that satisfies their needs. That is, AIs will need DPI too. So what will it look like? Let's focus on the digital identity element of an AI DPI to see what it might look like. Clearly, unless we do something about the digital of identity of agents, agentic finance will bring agentic fraud (just as instant payments brought instant fraud). Jelena Hoffart of Mastercard and I have written a paper about this 'know your agent' (KYA) problem for a forthcoming Journal of Digital Banking in which we identify the need for digital identity for agents as a fundamental enabler for agents to access financial services on behalf of individuals or organisations (or, indeed, themselves) to create a new financial environment able to generate better outcomes for consumers and businesses. To deliver on this vision of agentic finance as a means to improve financial health for all, we must therefore begin with a digital identity infrastructure that can provide identification, authentication and authorisation for not only financial institutions and their customers, but also their agents. In that environment, Know-your-customer (KYC) is necessary as know-your-business (KYB) and know-your-employee (KYE). But without know-your-agent (KYA) there will be no progress. Addressing these issues begins with verifiable credentials (VCs) and claims that provide granular access to, for example, the payments system. Some commentators see this in terms of granting agents access to the VCs of individuals and organisations in order to act on their behalf but that's not quite right. We don't want AIs to present our credentials, we want AIs to present their own credentials in order to obtain claims that we have consented to authorise. In other words, my bot shouldn't show up at a bank pretending to me: it should show up at a bank as a bot acting on my behalf. As I said at the start, the smart money is moving in. Persona, the verified identify platform used by a host of fintechs (including Robinhood, Brex and OpenAI) has raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation. The company says that rise of AI agents, increasingly sophisticated AI-driven fraud, regulatory fragmentation, and growing privacy expectations have created a far more complex — and constantly evolving — identity landscape. As Rick Song, CEO of Persona, puts it 'Identity in an AI-driven world isn't about ticking a box, and the question is no longer 'is this a bot or not?' but rather 'who is the bot acting on behalf of, and what is their intent?''. Indeed. This is how agentic commerce and agentic finance should work, and extending DPI to agent identities give us the right framework for ensuring that they do.
Zawya
19-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Agentic commerce: The paradox of tech advances
With the evolution of technology, business, society, and humans have increased their capacity to absorb change and developments. The new buzzword in the marketplace is agentic commerce, which was approximately $5-$6.7 billion in 2024. This includes the worldwide adoption of agentic AI solutions across various sectors like retail payments and customer service. It is expected to reach $10.41 billion by the end of 2025. It is forecasted that by 2030 to 2040, it will touch $41 to 200 billion. The annual growth rates are expected to be 35% to over 55%. The estimates are indicative of an explosive growth trajectory. Rapid digitalisation and automation across industries are leading to increasing reliance on AI. Furthermore, the advancements in AI models, integration with payment systems, and the demand for hyper-personalisation and seamless, autonomous shopping experiences, coupled with cost reduction and operational efficiency across enterprises, fuel the exponential growth of agentic commerce. For those wondering what this is all about, agentic refers to the ability to act independently and exhibit or achieve outcomes with external directions. Agentic is a rapidly emerging terminology in the field of AI. Agentic are AI systems that can autonomously pursue complex goals, make decisions, adapt, and execute multiple complex steps with minimal human interference. These systems are functioning beyond traditional automation. They are highly adaptive systems that can learn from experience and self-optimise based on real-time feedback. Agentic AI can potentially use advanced reasoning to solve people's problems. Agentic AI uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to solve complex, multi-step problems. The new transformative model in digital retail is called agentic-based commerce. Within the e-commerce system, AI agents act independently, execute, and complete transactions for users and businesses. AI agents power agentic commerce and are built from large models and other advanced AI technologies. Agentic systems, in terms of technological advancement in artificial intelligence, mark a significant step towards the creation of truly autonomous, adaptable, and proactive machines that can handle complex, dynamic tasks with minimal human oversight. The pace of technological advancement in artificial intelligence is applaudable. Humans have harnessed technology's potential to enhance efficiency and convenience and alleviate human suffering to some extent. However, artificial intelligence risks are eclipsing and/or eroding human-centric life experiences and amplifying systematic vulnerabilities. Innovations like AI-driven personalisation, virtual fitting rooms, smart shopping, AR, and VR tools that allow customers to visualise products remotely have arrived to revolutionise shopping experiences. Yet, these developments cannot replicate or replace the social bonding or spontaneity of in-store experiences. The paradigm shift witnessed towards hyper-convenience comes with a risk of commodifying human interactions and experiencing and prioritising speed over human connections. Human dependency on technological revolutions also exposes critical systemic weaknesses. For instance, the recent outages, such as Europe's April 2025 blackout, which affected 60 million people, and Microsoft's March 2024 service collapse, demonstrate systemic fragility. These events, which occurred in scant numbers, disrupted financial transactions, healthcare, and transportation and cost billions in lost productivity. Such technological developments can also increase AI-driven fraud and cloud infrastructure breaches that could threaten global stability. Psychologically speaking, excessive technology dependence correlates with increased levels of anxiety, social isolation, and attention deficits, which are more prevalent among adolescents. Research affirms that excessive screen time correlates with reduced empathy and emotional resilience, as online AI algorithms prioritise customer engagement over well-being. Artificial intelligence has had transformative effects and has demonstrated its potential to uplift society, yet it needs to be dealt with sufficient safeguards. Humankind's grave challenge lies in its ability to balance technological developments with safeguards and ensure that technology integration in daily activities does not lead to psychological disruptions or an increase in malicious intentions. As a society, we need to embrace and prioritise sustainability, resilience, and the well-being of people beyond efficiency. I leave my readers with a question they must ponder seriously: "As we all navigate this paradigm shift in duality, will technology fortify and enhance our future or render us perpetually vulnerable to systems we have created?' 2022 © All right reserved for Oman Establishment for Press, Publication and Advertising (OEPPA) Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (
