Automated software that makes purchases on behalf of consumers is attracting interest from the tech and financial industries, but the technology faces significant barriers before it becomes viable.
Mastercard on Wednesday published a report exploring what needs to happen to make agentic commerce workable. The report cites projections that agentic commerce in US consumer retail could reach $1 trillion in revenue by 2030, and that AI agents could intermediate more than $15 trillion in B2B spending by 2028.
At The AI Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Lindsay Walker, product manager at Hedera AI Studio, said agentic commerce is not a reality yet. "There are a lot of products out there claiming that they're creating agent wallets or agent cards. But when it comes down to it, it's not functional yet and hasn't truly emerged," she said. She expects it to become a real thing within five years.
Walker said current e-commerce systems work for humans but not for AI. She described trying to make a purchase with an AI agent that could not log in to access a shipping address or enter credit card details, requiring manual intervention. She said transactions cannot be run by probabilistic models and need deterministic gates that cannot be bypassed.
Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse bot and Perplexity's AI bot, and won a preliminary injunction that was later overturned as litigation continued. Walker said the x402 protocol for internet payments is still evolving and only addresses the payment moment.