The promise of agentic commerce, and the realities for credit unions

Close your eyes and think about all the ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entangled itself into your everyday life. Does it scare you or excite you?  Regardless of the emotion it triggers, AI is already subtly—and commonly more crudely embedded everywhere. Whether it’s summarizing internet search queries, generating a recap and defining actions items after a meeting, or viewing images and video content generated from someone’s simple prompt; AI is here, and it is becoming a part of everything. Now it’s time for AI to crudely become an engaging part of your everyday purchasing experiences. 

In April both Visa and Mastercard announced competing agentic commerce solutions, respectively called Intelligent Commerce and Agent Pay. The concept is simple, right? Eventually we’ll begin making and managing purchases through AI agents who provide a friendly interface overlaying the AI prompts used today, instead of the current shopping where we explore, shop, and make individual purchases ourselves, and across each individual merchant.

Visa recently demonstrated during their 2025 Product Drop the example of booking a vacation, which can be one of the most complicated shopping and booking experiences since there are so many components that need to be procured from many different providers. Think about the last vacation you booked and all the different websites you individually engaged with, which likely covered airlines, rental cars, hotel accommodations, activities and tours, and maybe even some restaurant reservations. It was probably a little more complicated if you also spent time trying to redeem loyalty program points and miles for any part of your bookings. 

Agentic commerce, for example promises a simpler way for you to build and book your best vacation yet, personalized based on your past spending habits, managed within your budget or available spend, and maybe even maximizing those points and miles in loyalty programs you’ve been saving for vacations just like this. Through a conversational experience you’ll engage an AI Agent or prompt presented to you as a friendly persona instead of crawling the web yourself and trying to piece together each individual part of your journey across all of those separate providers. 

What’s really happening behind the simple experience presented to the cardholder? Lots, and if you take a step back and think about the full stack that enables this agentic commerce experience for the cardholder, you’ll realize this has been years—maybe decades—in the making. Consider how these components of the payment network are orchestrated to deliver the agentic commerce experience:

Your cardholder will have to give permission to an AI agent to be able to curate the above-described shopping experience. Who hosts the AI agent and how network rules are written around permissions will inform if you as the credit union issuer even play a role in enabling this experience across your card programs. And, maybe 10 years later banking regulation will also catch up and help inform how this might work, too.

Enabling the AI agent to personalize the results of your cardholder’s prompt means someone must tell the agent something about them.  Payment networks already know how payment credentials are used and based on all of this data can derive attributes about you and I, and package them for merchants and AI agents alike. Along the same lines of permissions, this may be enabled outside of your purview as the credit union issuer of the payment card credentials.

A big part of building out agentic commerce needs to be around building trust across all stakeholders, including merchants, AI agent providers, acquirers and processors, issuers, and ultimately the cardholder. If the cardholder doesn’t trust the experience, then none of the agentic commerce experience really matters as it won’t be adopted as a preferred shopping experience. New data and risk scoring approaches will be needed to ensure an AI Agent can’t be the new enumeration or card fraud attack vector before they are used by cardholders for everyday purchasing.

Payment tokens are a critical part of how agentic commerce will work. As you book the above vacation the agent may need to make several different purchases across several different merchants or websites. Expect a unique token to be used either bound to the AI agent, or individually for each unique transaction made by the AI agent as part of the broader booking experience. Payment tokens aren’t new, and if your cards participate in Apple Pay and Google Pay, then you’re already issuing tokens on behalf of your cardholder. Token use and issuance will proliferate as agent commerce moves us into an environment where tokens aren’t just device bound for Apple Pay or Google Pay, or merchant bound for card-on-file or recurring payment arrangements, but merchant issued; and where a third party is permissioned to issue any number of tokens on your cardholders behalf and perhaps on a per transaction basis. 

New entrants to the payments ecosystem, such as the platforms who will provide merchants and acquirers the AI agent experience, will be enabled on these payment networks through new APIs. This will allow the AI agent to generate tokens, authorize transactions, personalize the experience using data tokens, and consume risk scoring and new signals to keep the promise of agentic commerce safe and respective fraud and chargeback rates low.

As a credit union your role is to ensure any payment card credentials you issue to your members are the easiest ways to pay in new ways like agentic commerce. Now is the time to get ready for different ways your cardholders will be enabled to transact using your credit and debit card credentials. Ensuring your partners like Group Service Providers (GSPs) and issuer processors can be a fast enabler of payment network innovation like what was described above is now the new standard. While it may take some time for agentic commerce to become something used every day by your average cardholder, learn as much as you can and get familiar with who the payment ecosystem players are who will be driving these experiences. Engage your existing business partners and learn how they will play a role in enablement or support of authorization and post-purchase experiences.     

The future is now, and the pace of change in payments won’t likely be slowing down anytime soon.

Need help evolving your credit union’s payments function from operations into a strategic contributor to your growth strategy? Visit https://www.christopherdanvers.com/advisory and request a consultation today.