Payments glossary

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is buying and selling where an AI agent acts for a person: it finds products, builds the order and completes the payment within limits the person approved.

The hard part is payment: an agent shouldn't hold a buyer's card number. Agent payment systems solve this with scoped tokens and signed approvals, so the agent can pay only a specific seller, up to an approved amount.

Several standards are emerging, including the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), card-network programs such as Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, and x402 for stablecoin machine payments. They are at different stages and are not interoperable.