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From autonomous agents executing purchases to network-level credential transformations, the payments ecosystem is entering a moment of rapid realignment in agentic commerce. Networks, issuers, and merchants all recognize that agent-driven transactions represent a new revenue surface, a new fraud surface, and a new control surface. And they’re each lobbying, loudly, for the right to shape how these transactions are accepted, routed, and evaluated.

Agentic commerce is here and continues to grow. To help merchants navigate this shift, we’re excited to launch our Agentic Commerce Guide for Merchants, a concise resource that demystifies the building blocks of agentic systems and shows merchants how to prepare for this new landscape today.

As agentic commerce becomes increasingly digital, protocol-driven interactions promise speed, privacy, and automation. However, somewhere between these mandates and emerging agentic protocols, a dangerous gap is forming, in which merchants are losing access to the data and context that have long powered fraud prevention, authorization intelligence, customer understanding, and overall business optimization.

As agentic protocols, such as AP2 and MCP, reshape how digital transactions are initiated, evaluated, and completed, merchants must understand the data elements being passed through these protocols and which data they don’t have access to.

As commerce becomes increasingly agentic, the shift toward protocol-driven interactions promises speed, privacy, and automation. Yet, somewhere between mandates and protocols, a dangerous gap is forming. Merchants are losing sight of their customer payment data altogether. Our goal is to help merchants prepare for the coming wave of agentic commerce.  At VGS, we believe that this is an incredible new channel.

In the age of AI-driven commerce, the concept of agentic payments is transforming the way buying and selling occur online. Instead of a customer manually browsing, comparing, and checking out, intelligent agents, powered by machine learning and large language models, act on the consumer’s behalf to discover, negotiate, and complete purchases. This shift represents a major evolution from traditional e-commerce toward an agentic commerce ecosystem, where trusted digital agents handle everything from product discovery to payment.

As agentic commerce continues to move at a rapid pace, agentic protocols and start-up consortia are at the center of the dialogue, often leaving merchants out of the conversation. One of the biggest unanswered questions remains: ‘How will agentic commerce impact merchants?’

The world of online commerce is undergoing a significant transformation, with a new paradigm emerging: agentic commerce. Agentic commerce is an AI-powered shopping experience that can understand complex user requests, browse products, and even complete transactions on behalf of the customer.

Agentic payments are quickly becoming a transformative force in finance and technology. As AI-driven tools evolve from passive assistants to autonomous agents, the concept of agentic payments, where AI can initiate and execute financial transactions, is rapidly gaining serious traction.

Whether you're building a new AI agent or are a payments AI enabler looking to optimize your payments processes in agentic commerce, this toolkit combines essential VGS products in one package.