Step 01 / 06
Intent
User intent (in agent)
User asks the agent to find a product or service.
Agentic commerce 101
Agentic payments, agentic discovery: what do these terms mean in practice? This section defines them, explains how agents change the relationship between buyer, merchant, and payment, and lays out the stages in the shift from assistive AI to delegated spending.
The three stages of online commerce
Commerce has reinvented itself twice in twenty-five years, and each time the payment system had to be rebuilt to match.
Agentic is the third stage, and it is arriving faster than the infrastructure built for the first two can absorb. McKinsey projects agentic commerce could drive $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global consumer transactions by 2030, with up to $1 trillion in the US retail market alone.
2000s
Stage 1
2000s
Stage 1
eCommerce
Humans browse and click. Digital PSPs emerge.
2010s
Stage 2
2010s
Stage 2
Mobile
Humans tap to pay. Wallets and tokenization arrive; the iPhone resets checkout.
Today
Stage 3
Today
Stage 3
Agentic
Agents browse, compare, and advise. Consumers already use AI, but most purchases still complete on traditional flows.
At each stage, it was not only the interface for purchasing that changed. Both consumer behavior and the payment layer had to be re-engineered before the new model could scale. The companies that built the rails early set the terms for everyone who arrived later. Agentic is the stage still being defined, and the first live proofs are already here.
Agentic commerce only works if the whole payments industry moves together: AI platforms, card networks, banks, and merchants. No one company can build the connection between them alone.
Hilla Peled
SVP of Data Science and AI, Nuvei
Defining the age of agentic: commerce vs discovery
"Agentic commerce," "AI-driven purchasing," and "LLM shopping discovery" are terms frequently used interchangeably across the industry, but they describe different things.
Agentic commerce is the medium through which consumers start making purchases. And it has two phases: the AI-led discovery phase, happening today and the agentic payment phase, which is still being built. One is about where decisions are made; the other is about how the money moves. Let's break them down.
AI-led discovery (today)
Most of what is live today can be described as LLM-led discovery. On behalf of a consumer, an agent (ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini) searches, compares options, and recommends. When the consumer decides, the agent hands the purchase back to them, and payment is completed on the merchant's own checkout as a standard transaction. The agent does the shopping but the human still pays.
Step 02 / 06
Discovery
Agent discovery
Agent searches, compares, and recommends options.
Step 03 / 06
Decision
User decision
User selects a preferred option.
Step 04 / 06
Handoff
Handoff to merchant
Agent redirects the user to the merchant website.
Step 05 / 06
Checkout
Merchant-controlled checkout
User completes checkout on the merchant site.
Step 06 / 06
Payment
Traditional payment execution
Payment is processed as a standard eCommerce transaction.
01 / 06
Agentic payments are the next step. The consumer sets a mandate in advance, say a limit of two hundred dollars on a defined task. The agent then initiates and completes the transaction itself, inside its own environment, with no redirect to a merchant checkout.
The point of initiating the payment moves from the human, the way it was done in the eCommerce world, to the machine.
Agentic payments (near future)
In this phase of agentic commerce, discovery, authorization, and payment all happen inside the agent, with the agent initiating the transaction. That is the key shift, at step four: the payment stops being user-initiated and becomes agent-initiated instead.
Step 01 / 08
Intent
User intent (in agent)
User asks the agent to find a product or service.
Step 02 / 08
Discovery
Agent discovery
Agent searches, compares, and recommends options.
Step 03 / 08
Mandate
Mandate and authorization
User authorizes the agent to purchase on their behalf.
- Confirms purchase intent
- Defines mandate scope, e.g. buy under $200
Step 04 / 08
Trigger
Agent-triggered transaction
Agent initiates the transaction on behalf of the user.
- No redirect to merchant checkout
- Transaction originates within the agent environment
Step 05 / 08
Validation
Trust and validation
Transaction is validated across multiple parties.
- Cardholder identity verified
- Agent and mandate confirmed in scope
- Network and issuer approve the transaction
Step 06 / 08
Processing
In-agent payment processing
Payment is executed via a new transaction type.
- Processed as an agent-triggered payment
- Runs on existing card networks under new agentic frameworks
Step 07 / 08
Fulfillment
Merchant fulfillment and confirmation
Merchant receives the order and processes fulfillment.
- Order confirmation returned to the agent
- Merchant handles fulfillment and customer communications
Step 08 / 08
Confirmation
Confirmation in agent
User receives confirmation within the agent interface.
- Order details
- Delivery updates
01 / 08
That shift - from a person initiating the payment in the AI-discovery and eCommerce stage to one where an agent makes the payment on the user's behalf - is where the current infrastructure has the biggest bottleneck.
For decades, the payments infrastructure relied on a human at every stage of the purchase. A transaction with no human at the checkout has to carry trust in two directions at once: trust in the consumer, validated as it is today via KYC, and trust in the agent acting for them, validated via new protocols, such as Know Your Agent.
As Mentxu Trivino, VP of Payments Partnership at Nuvei puts it:
The question is no longer whether a payment can be processed. It is who, or what, is authorizing it, what that actor is allowed to do, and who is liable when something goes wrong.
This next era of agentic commerce requires a different infrastructure and different rules of governance, making sure the agent initiating the payment is verified, trustworthy, and carries the credible user intent. This is exactly where Nuvei is building.
First-party and third-party agents
There is a second distinction that decides how merchants meet this shift. A first-party agent is one a merchant runs itself, inside its own site, app, and customer relationship. A third-party agent is a public assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini that acts across many merchants at once. The two raise different trust questions, and the merchants Nuvei works with are clear that they will meet the first-party version first. That ordering shapes everything Nuvei is building.
But before we get into that, let's see what consumers have to say about how they use AI when making purchases.
BLOG
Know Your Agent: why KYA is the new control point for agentic commerce.
As AI agents start shopping and paying on behalf of consumers, Know Your Agent becomes the new trust layer in payments. How PSPs and acquirers can govern agent identity, mandates, and local execution.
Read more