agentic commerce
Agentic commerce is an agent completing a purchase for somebody through a merchant's own checkout. The merchant keeps the order, the payment and the customer relationship; the agent presents the buyer, the cart and a payment credential. The commerce stack stays the merchant's, and the agent is a party to it.
The protocols that use the phrase define it themselves. The Agentic Commerce Protocol describes an open standard for programmatic commerce flows between buyers, AI agents and businesses, published under an open-source licence. The Universal Commerce Protocol describes building blocks for agentic commerce across industries, from discovery to checkout and beyond, built on transports and agent standards that already exist.
Stripe's documentation states the same thing from the seller's side: agentic commerce uses AI agents to support transactions between buyers and sellers. Those agents act as intermediaries, presenting product feeds, managing carts and checkout, and accepting payments. A seller integrating for it shares a product catalogue with agents — the capability that same table marks unsupported for a machine payment.
The distinction decides where the evidence of a purchase ends up. A checkout completed on a merchant's stack leaves its record with the merchant and its processor, where a third party has no way to read it. A machine payment states its terms in a response any client may request, and settles on a network anybody can query afterwards. The two categories are observable from outside to entirely different degrees.
→ probe402 measures the machine-payment side of that boundary, and what it sends and records at each check is set out in the method.
Sources
- The Agentic Commerce ProtocolAgentic Commerce Protocol
- The Universal Commerce ProtocolUniversal Commerce Protocol
- Agentic commerceStripe documentation
Related machine payment · agent · payment challenge