A-Commerce Evolution: Agentic Commerce as The New Frontier

By Maitree Mervana Parekh, Lauren Kolodny

Every major technological shift has transformed commerce and payments, resulting in generational companies along the way. The early web era unlocked online commerce, allowing platforms like Amazon and eBay to digitally connect sellers with global audiences, and necessitated new payment infrastructure like PayPal and WorldPay to revolutionize online payments. The rise of the social web turned networks into powerful discovery and distribution engines, enabling direct merchant-to-consumer relationships at scale. This was further accelerated as the mobile revolution gave rise to ubiquitous connectivity and unlocked location-based services like Uber and Instacart. These necessitated even more modular and seamless transactional infrastructure unlocking opportunities for Stripe, Square, and Shopify. Each wave of commerce innovation brought new requirements in compliance, fraud prevention, and payments infrastructure — simultaneously creating massive opportunities for founders building the next generation of enabling technologies.

Now, we stand at the brink of a new era in commerce, and anticipate the same dynamic playing out. AI is creating a shift from manual, search-based transactions to more autonomous, intent-driven and personalized transaction experiences. As we saw in prior technology waves, the path of discovery and distribution massively evolved for merchants (ex: SEO and social media as critical gateways). Today, we’re already witnessing the early stages of AI-facilitated discovery through answer engines like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude, which act as intermediaries between consumers and merchants by synthesizing information and providing recommendations, rather than simply displaying an endless feed of links. This represents a fundamental shift in the discovery paradigm. The next frontier of AI includes autonomous agent systems, where LLMs not only respond to queries but proactively direct their own processes, orchestrate multiple tools, and execute complex tasks with minimal intervention.

This will mean for the first time, agents will be invited into the payment system and will transact and negotiate dynamically on behalf of individuals, businesses, and even with other AI agents — creating a radically different commercial landscape.

Introducing A-commerce

Agentic commerce represents a paradigm shift where AI agents participate in commercial transactions, acting on behalf of users, businesses, or autonomously. This transcends traditional shopping/retail use cases. Agents will make purchasing decisions, negotiate prices, and execute a variety of transactions autonomously based on predefined parameters and learned preferences. Unlike traditional commerce where humans drive all decision-making, agentic commerce introduces intermediaries that can understand context, interpret intent, and take action within specified boundaries.

Modes of Agent-led Transactions

The Landscape

While we are in early innings, the pace of AI innovation and adoption has been unprecedented. A-commerce will follow suit. This market map provides a framework for understanding the evolving opportunities and highlights the early movers currently laying the foundation for agent-driven transactions. We want to acknowledge that this market map is not exhaustive, in part due to the breakneck pace of innovation.

At a high-level, we segment the A-commerce landscape into two primary layers: Agents (/AI-Enabled Apps) and Enablers.

Agents/Apps: This layer represents the transactional interfaces — we anticipate seeing both general purpose and vertical agents for consumers and businesses alike. This may look like a shopping assistant for a consumer to an agent that manages the procurement process for a business. Ultimately, these agents will transact fully.

Vertical agents will massively simplify complex and fragmented purchases. For example, a travel transaction requires contextual understanding of preferences and logistics as well as facilitation with multiple vendors. This is a natural example of where an AI travel agent can shine. We anticipate many other verticals to see purpose built agents deliver immense value.

Enablers: The supporting stack is critical to allow buyer’s agents to participate in commercial transactions and merchants to adapt to this new mode of commerce.

• Access: The shift to agent-driven transactions will necessitate new access infrastructure that enables agents to authenticate, retrieve information, and call tools. This may even require new identity frameworks for agents. The emerging development of MCP (model context protocol) servers may be an unlock in enabling more structured, secure, and interoperable systems for agents to interact across platforms.
• Payments: Today’s financial rails were designed for human-initiated transactions, where users actively verify purchases and authenticate accounts, creating clearer rules for dispute resolution. However, agents will increasingly require seamless ways to access & authenticate to perform transactions. The requirements will depend on the use case and level of user involvement / control (Simon Taylor recently laid out the spectrum of agent transactions in relation to how involved a user might be in the transaction flow).
• Merchant Solutions: Merchants will need new tools to stay discoverable, accessible, and protected as agent-led transactions become more pervasive. Agent-driven fraud presents new risks, requiring better detection and mitigation strategies. As agents take over more of the transactional flow, ensuring they operate securely and within controls is critical. Programmatic controls, secure credential sharing and authorization will be important functionalities required for users to build trust with agents. There is also an opportunity — or perhaps an imperative — to fundamentally redesign a dynamic “storefront” to surface personalized goods/services to transacting users, agents and consumers alike.

Closing Thoughts

Our own views here are evolving in real time and we welcome your input as we continue to refine the market map and a collective perspective for what the future holds. Our hope is to keep a dynamic database of companies innovating in this space — please ping us with companies that should be added here.

We are grateful to those who contributed, challenged, and expanded our views on this topic, including Cuy Sheffield (Visa), Daphne Che (Montage), Jeff Weiner (Stripe), Jess Ou (LangChain), Jonathan King (Coinbase), Murtaza Meerza, Rachel Zabronsky (PayPal), and many others.

As the A-commerce ecosystem matures, new challenges and opportunities will emerge — many of which we have yet to imagine. Founders will drive the magic here, and we’re here to support them when they do.