New term: agentic commerce

2025-09-29 · Publisher : OpenAI et Stripe · Domain : Artificial Intelligence

Agentic commerce is purchasing carried out by an AI agent on the user's behalf, from product search to payment. OpenAI and Stripe popularized it on September 29, 2025 with Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol.

### Definition **Agentic commerce** refers to transactions an AI agent carries out on a customer's behalf: it compares, chooses, fills the cart and pays, carrying the user's identity, payment method and buying context. ### Origin As early as April 29, 2025, Mastercard spoke of an "agentic commerce" future when launching Agent Pay. The term went mainstream on September 29, 2025: OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, with Etsy and, announced, more than a million Shopify merchants, and open-sourced the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), built with Stripe. Stripe summed it up: "In AI-driven commerce, agents act for the customer, carrying their identity, payment method and buying context into the transaction." ### What the term covers - ACP, a shared language between agents and merchants that leaves merchants in control of what they sell. - Stripe's Shared Payment Token, limited to one merchant and one amount, so payment credentials are never exposed. - Competing initiatives: Mastercard Agent Pay, Visa Intelligent Commerce, Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). ### Criticism and limits Instant Checkout did not deliver: OpenAI dropped it in March 2026. Users relied on ChatGPT to research rather than to buy, and merchants wanted to keep the customer relationship. Purchases went back to merchants' own sites, through their apps in ChatGPT. ### Key takeaway Agentic commerce lays the technical groundwork (protocols, delegated payment tokens) for purchases handed to agents. Its adoption depends less on technology than on the trust of customers and merchants.

Tags : Vocabulaire, Agents, Commerce, Paiement