AI is making sweeping changes to everything from product recommendations to checkout and changing the way consumers shop online.
Nowadays, agentic checkout is the latest battleground for AI dominance within e-commerce. Online payment incumbents like Mastercard and Visa released their respective agentic checkout programs in April—Agent Pay and Intelligent Commerce. In May, Google said it plans to launch Agentic Checkout in the coming months. And PayPal is offering developers its Agent Toolkit to support order creation, invoicing, and shipping.
By definition, agentic checkout is built on the same principles as AI shopping agents. Both are derived from agentic AI, a more sophisticated AI system, which is trained to reason and act on behalf of shoppers. Three experts said the success of agentic checkout will rely on strong partnerships between payment providers, e-commerce platforms, and technology innovators.
Dave Anderson, VP of product marketing for digital analytics company Contentsquare, told Retail Brew that this moment is like “the dawn of a whole new industry, much like when SEO [search engine optimization] and PPC [pay-per-click] first started,” Anderson wrote in an email.
“The payment companies and e-commerce platforms that position themselves as the infrastructure powering AI agents, rather than competing against them, will capture the most value as this market develops,” Anderson said.
Meanwhile, PayPal is paying it forward with new improvements. “We’re upgrading our infrastructure built over decades to handle the heavier event volume of AI-driven transactions,” Michelle Gill, GM of small business and financial services at PayPal, told Retail Brew in an email.
“To make agentic commerce real, we’re equipping developers with open, interoperable tools like PayPal’s Agent Toolkit to support order creation, invoicing, and shipping. This unlocks the ability to build production-ready, agent-powered experiences with confidence,” Gill said.
While this sounds like a lot of work, Mastercard’s Co-President of Global Partnerships Sherri Haymond said that retailers won’t need to “rip out” their entire technology infrastructure for this transition: “As a retailer…I don’t think they’re going to be running to change their e-commerce platform provider or anything like that, so long as those e-commerce platform providers—which I know they are—are working to make these environments accessible to their merchant community.”
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“I would encourage merchants to have an open mind, and to be willing to explore this new technology, and to lean in and do the work to make their environment accessible in this new way,” Haymond said.
Last week, even Open AI reportedly said it will build checkout functionality within ChatGPT.
At a high level, Haymond said that agentic checkout really is changing what’s possible in online shopping: “I think it has the potential to bring a whole different level of…with consumer consent, personalization and speed and efficiency.”
“For what it’s worth, we don’t think that anytime soon [that] all transactions are going to be autonomous or anything like that, [or] agents are going to go buy things without humans…without their consent, or anything like that,” Haymond added.
“Agentic commerce requires open infrastructure, verified identity, and seamless, secure payments—and that’s what we’re delivering,” Gill said. She added PayPal’s tools “integrate easily into agent frameworks without locking developers into a closed ecosystem.” The general sense in the industry is that “rather than competing, these stakeholders increasingly collaborate to harness the potential of agentic AI,” she said.
Ultimately, whether AI will get along with e-commerce and payment providers remains to be seen. Anderson said that the ecosystem is evolving to include AI, but “not necessarily” for AI to replace current players in e-commerce and/or payment providers completely.
“Over time, their ability to get along will come down to how AI firms will recoup their costs,” he said. “It’s likely they’ll take commissions just like any marketplace, and retailers will probably end up paying for better positioning in AI recommendations—similar to how they bid on Google today.”