Investing.com — Agentic commerce accounts for less than 1% of overall e-commerce activity, even as new AI shopping tools from Meta and Anthropic launched this week.
Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent capable of autonomously executing multistep tasks including email, travel booking, shopping and project management.
Anthropic launched Commerce Agents, an open-source framework designed to help companies build consumer shopping agents and merchant-side operational agents rather than a standalone shopping assistant.
A messaging-first personal AI agent called Instinct, which allows users to text or call to delegate online errands, has also gone viral, at least in Silicon Valley.
The launches follow OpenAI’s abandonment of its Instant Checkout feature, while Google has focused more on infrastructure and standards than on controlling agentic payments, the note said.
Agentic commerce is often discussed as a potential risk for Visa and Mastercard, but “it’s very much the opposite,” analysts at Bernstein said, citing more digitization, transactions and value-added services.
Cards will remain the payment method of choice in the agentic world given their dispute management, standards and more than 7 billion credentials and 100 million-plus merchants, the firm said. “Any entity that tries to disintermediate cards for agentic payments is likely doomed.”
None of the recent agent launches currently seek to control merchant payments, instead offering frictionless ways for consumers to execute purchases, such as through single-use virtual cards for Muse, the note said.
Visa and Mastercard have developed their own agentic tokens and standards, including Trusted Agent Protocol, Verifiable Intent, Agent Pay and Intelligent Commerce. Bernstein said 100% of agentic transactions will be tokenized.
Agent-to-agent micro-payments remain in the “proof-of-concept stage,” Bernstein said, citing the x402 protocol launched by Coinbase and Cloudflare.
The protocol has generated roughly $0.5 million to $1 million in monthly volume a year after launch, with average transaction sizes of about $0.20.
Agentic commerce also means more complexity for merchants, creating a differentiation opportunity for processors such as Adyen, Bernstein said. Adyen launched Adyen Agentic this summer to let enterprises sell through AI platforms without rebuilding commerce systems for each new channel.
GenAI referral traffic as a share of total referrals has risen sharply over the past two years, reaching 39% for Wayfair, 28% for Walmart, 25% for Target, 23% for Etsy and 22% for eBay as of August 2026.
