Agentic Commerce Will Be Won Under the Hood

Agentic commerce is, by design, something you cannot watch. A buyer hands intent to an agent and looks away. A merchant accepts a transaction from software it has never met. A developer ships a payment flow they'll never personally click through. The traditional checkout that’s built for humans quietly disappears.

Today, agents are already capable of comparing and suggesting – intelligence is largely a solved problem. What isn't solved yet is the agentic commerce infrastructure that lets sellers expose their products to agents without losing control over their brand, and a reliable way to move money between parties who have never interacted.

I recently moderated a panel discussion in San Francisco on this exact question, and the conversation kept returning to the same place: the success of agentic commerce hinges on the reliability of its infrastructure.

Airwallex Product Director of Payments Mo Mehanna (left) with Parinaz Firozi of Anthropic, Prateek Dudeja of Google, and Samira Rahmatullah of Visa at Airwallex’s Our Agentic Future panel discussion

Intelligence is plentiful. Trust is not.

Agentic commerce volumes are still relatively low, and the main reason is trust.

Buyers, sellers, and agent builders want a set of operational guarantees: secure identity, clear mandates, protection of credentials, and fraud systems that can tell a legitimate agent from malicious automation. Trust is pressure-tested in the hard flows such as disputes, refunds, and cancellations. Compliance and auditability are required from the first transaction.

None of it is glamorous. All of it is load-bearing.

Thankfully, we’re making progress and closing the trust deficit from three sides of the new agentic ecosystem.

Buyers: The leap of faith comes first

The current gap between hype and reality is widest for the buyer. The enthusiasm is genuine, yet autonomous transaction volumes remain negligible. People are comfortable letting an agent research a purchase. Far fewer are ready to let it decide and pay on their behalf.

Before a buyer hands a real purchase to an agent, several conditions have to be true. So far, experimentation has clustered around low-stakes decisions where the parameters are easy to set, such as automating repetitive transactions like bill payments, or catching time-sensitive purchases like product drops and travel deals. Even in these cases, the underlying requirement is the same: buyers need assurance that agents are acting faithfully on their behalf.

The constraint is rarely the intelligence of the agent. The buyer has to believe the agent will get it right, and has to know there is a reliable path to a refund or a dispute when it gets it wrong. That belief is built on infrastructure and liability constructs that are still not present today.

Sellers: Be discovered without being erased

Sellers are caught in a genuine bind. They need agents to discover them, and at the same time are terrified of being reduced to a data point inside an algorithm. Brands have spent years and fortunes building and optimising experiences for humans. Agent-mediated purchases can either extend that experience or quietly erase it.

The sellers I talk to frame it as a control problem. They want to be discoverable as a trusted vendor to agents, and to accept agent-initiated payments safely. But not at the cost of handing their brand to a black box.

But, it’s important to remember the flip side – shopping inside an LLM interface is contextual. The seller’s brand voice, values, and product qualifications can now move from simple visual cues on their website to detailed description pages that provide context to the buyer, and that’s powerful. As long as sellers ensure that those descriptions are structured and exposed in ways agents can readily parse, these detailed metadata will speak directly to the buyer's intent. Shopping agents just have to provide the tools and shopping experiences that help brands preserve their identity, voice and experience.

The winning sellers will treat agentic discovery as a channel they actively instrument and govern, and a powerful tool to find new buyers in the exact contexts their brands were built for.

Builders: The infrastructure has to be invisible

Agent builders want finance infrastructure to simply work, so they can focus on what they're actually developing. Payments cannot be an afterthought in an agentic product. The moment an agent transacts, payments become a first-class requirement.

The role of protocols in addressing this is critical. They are primarily open standards attempting to create a common language for different stakeholders, so real-world payment infrastructure is safely accessible to builders and agents.

The reality is that tooling for builders will diversify, and the complexity and choice will only grow as it did with eCommerce platforms in the 2000s. Curating the right agentic commerce stack from a myriad of provider tools will be a key decision for builders.

How Airwallex supports each side

We’ve spent the last 10 years building regulated global financial infrastructure, collapsing payments, FX, and issuing into one platform on modernised APIs. It was never the flashiest work, but it turns out to be exactly the foundation agentic commerce needs: rails that move money at machine speed, with compliance and protections built in.

For buyers and their agents, we believe the wallet becomes the trust primitive on top of those rails: the layer where credentials, permissions, and controls live. That’s why we’ve built Airi. Going beyond the one-click checkout capabilities, Airi will soon let buyers issue virtual cards and agentic tokens with controlled permissions and spend controls to safely and securely carry out specific agentic commerce mandates.

For sellers, we built the Agentic Commerce Suite to help them capitalise on this new demand. It’s an MCP-ready checkout and product feed that makes their products discoverable to all agents, an Agentic Risk Engine equipped to discern malicious bots from legitimate agents, and a protocol orchestration layer to accept payments, including the harder flows.

Builders and agents will have access to all of these and more from Airwallex via our AgentOS agentic operating system.

As intelligence becomes plentiful, trust becomes scarcer. Success in the agentic era requires building trust under the hood across all parties in the ecosystem, and across every market money lands.

If you're a seller or an AI company building for this shift, come build with us.