Alicia Ngomo Fernandez
Global AI Lead for Visa Consulting & Analytics, Visa Europe
Agentic commerce is emerging as one of the most important shifts in digital trade since the rise of mobile commerce.
At its core, agentic commerce refers to AI agents autonomously managing the purchase journey from discovery and comparison to payment and post-purchase support. Rather than simply recommending products, these systems can interpret user intent, evaluate options, apply budget or delivery preferences, select payment methods, execute transactions and support through fulfilment, returns, or service interactions.
In that sense, agentic commerce isn’t just a new shopping interface; it’s a redesign of how transactions happen.
The shift is already happening
For years, digital commerce has been shaped by search engines, marketplaces, branded storefronts and mobile apps.
Consumers are increasingly asking AI tools to narrow options, compare products and guide them to the best outcome. AI therefore becomes not just a new distribution channel but an agent in the commerce flow, one that could reshape visibility, brand influence and conversion in much the same way mobile transformed expectations around speed and convenience. McKinsey estimates agentic commerce could orchestrate $3T–$5T globally by 2030.1
Early signals already point to meaningful demand. Traffic from generative AI platforms to merchant sites reportedly surged 4700% year-on-year to July 2025,2 and this traffic appears more qualified than traditional search traffic. Users arriving from AI assistants often come with stronger purchase intent because filtering, comparison and evaluation have already happened upstream. Data suggests lower bounce rates, higher engagement and improving conversion patterns.3
While these aren’t yet fully autonomous purchases, they indicate consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable delegating parts of the shopping process to AI.
Users arriving from AI assistants often come with stronger purchase intent because filtering, comparison and evaluation
have already happened upstream.
Data suggests lower bounce rates, higher engagement and improving conversion pattern
How does it change the power dynamics?
For merchants, the opportunity comes with tension. Agentic commerce could unlock incremental demand, especially for smaller or niche brands that can be surfaced by AI without massive advertising budgets.
At the same time, it threatens merchant control over how products are presented, ranked and experienced. Businesses will need to decide how openly they participate — whether through structured product data for AI discovery, direct integrations with AI platforms or proprietary agents of their own.
Financial institutions, issuers and acquirers face a different challenge: supporting a new type of customer interaction. There are gains to be made by becoming the trust infrastructure of agentic commerce. Meanwhile, AI platforms stand to benefit by controlling discovery, orchestration and agent access.
The time to mobilise is now
Payments remain the final piece of the puzzle. Autonomous transactions typically rely on trust, permissions, identity verification, authentication, secure credential access and clear liability rules. The industry is now building these foundations through tokenisation, passkeys, agent identity standards, merchant validation flows and delegated authorisation frameworks.
Visa’s Visa Intelligence Commerce initiatives are one example of this evolution. Without such infrastructure, agentic commerce remains partially manual. With it, AI agents could securely execute end-to-end transactions on behalf of users.
This is why agentic commerce matters now. It represents the next major shift after mobile commerce, and it’s currently being designed. As trust, merchant readiness and payment infrastructure mature, commerce may increasingly become agent-mediated. Those slow to adapt may pay a high price.
This article is provided for informational purposes only and doesn’t constitute legal, regulatory, financial or other professional advice. Readers should obtain appropriate independent advice for their specific circumstances.”
[1] McKinsey. (2025). The agentic commerce opportunity: How AI agents are ushering in a new era for consumers and merchants. https://tinyurl.com/3u8kc9x6.
[2] Forbes. (2025). Gen-AI driven traffic to U.S. ecommerce sites up 4,700%, Adobe Reports. https://tinyurl.com/5y5evude.
[3] Pandya, V. (2025). Adobe Analytics: Traffic to U.S. retail websites from Generative AI sources jumps 1,200 percent. https://tinyurl.com/ajbn2vdb.
