# What is the actual Point of agentic commerce?

## What is agentic commerce (my definition)

An AI Agent making a purchase without a human interfacing with the vendor.

The human does not visit the vendor website, they don't contact someone that works for the vendor, etc.

The human may be the one that specifies the intent of what purchase should be ("buy me commercial insurance for my office"), or they may not ("set up my office to be ready for us to move in by 2 weeks from now").

## Background

Many notable companies have made protocols, efforts, blogs, features, payment methods, APIs, and more to support the agentic purchasing layer. Companies like Google, Visa, Stripe, Amazon, Microsoft, Mastercard, Oracle.

Examples: [Google's Agent Payments Protocol](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-pay/agent-payments-protocol-fido-alliance/), [Google's Universal Commerce Protocol](https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/), [Visa Intelligent Commerce](https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/newsroom/product-drop-intelligent-commerce.html), [Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol](https://corporate.visa.com/en/sites/visa-perspectives/newsroom/visa-unveils-trusted-agent-protocol-for-ai-commerce.html), [Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol](https://stripe.com/blog/developing-an-open-standard-for-agentic-commerce), [Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite](https://stripe.com/blog/agentic-commerce-suite), [Amazon's Buy for Me](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-agentic-ai-gen-ai-shopping), [Microsoft Copilot Checkout](https://news.microsoft.com/source/2026/01/08/microsoft-propels-retail-forward-with-agentic-ai-capabilities-that-power-intelligent-automation-for-every-retail-function/), [Mastercard Agent Pay](https://newsroom.mastercard.com/news/press/2025/april/mastercard-unveils-agent-pay-pioneering-agentic-payments-technology-to-power-commerce-in-the-age-of-ai/), and [Oracle's procurement agents](https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/ai-world-oracle-ai-agents-help-supply-chain-leaders-boost-operational-efficiency-2025-10-15/).

## What is the actual utility of buying something with an agent?

Why wouldn't we just buy everything that we need to buy with people? What are we to gain from agents buying our stuff?

Most of the use cases are for items in the b2b purchasing (procurement) space.

For buyers, agentic commerce has the advantage for:

- purchases that people don't enjoy purchasing, but are necessary
- purchases where buying requires a lot of specification / customization
- purchases requiring very fast turnaround (or constant re-evaluation)
- purchases too cheap to warrant allocating human time
- purchases requiring reading a lot of information (web research) to determine if the product is a good fit
- purchases requiring tight coordination with other purchases (combinatorics)

For sellers, agentic commerce has the advantage for:

- Fastest turnaround time for impatient leads
- The best customization via AI making quotes based on customer requests for proposal (RFPs)
- The best business aligned sales rep (won't optimize for overselling a customer that churns)
- Similarly, the most consistent sales rep (they have to follow the system prompt)
- Easier to provide evidence of claims (can quote other a larger amount of web content that helps the sale, and know that it will be read and processed)
- Can begin selling things that were too-small-to-sell. Something like a paid sample instead of the free trial system.

## The overall theme of advantages

The primary advantage for the buyer is reducing the time it takes to buy, but the primary advantage for the sellers is that it reduces the cost of acquiring customers (CAC).

### My personal examples where I think that an agentic purchase could fit

Earlier this year, I signed a separation agreement that was given to me by an attorney at Cooley, Jon Gavenman, which was fairly template. This was about a 10 email correspondence and a 30 minute zoom call. However, the documents that had all the information that he needed to know were just on my computer. Which means, we could have done the transaction in maybe a couple of api calls / emails if it was just my ai agent providing redacted information from my docs, and then the attorney verifying that they look good before submitting.

Last year, I got 2 different second opinions while I considered options for my ankle surgery (more info at [bumankle.com](https://bumankle.com)). I already had my CT and MRI files that I had gathered via requesting the hospital. It is then a form fill process to then interface with request for secondary opinion, about 30 pages, which my claude-in-chrome automations ran out of patience while filling out requiring me to fill out this info. An agent buying this service can have a higher guarantee that I'm filling out this service correctly.

### The disadvantage of my 2 examples

On the lawyer: lawyers often provide near-free services such as NDAs and other template documents in order to develop a relationship for future much larger transactions, such as an acquisitions.

## thank you for reading!

Raymond Xu<br>
Founder, Talkshi<br>
[talkshi.com](https://talkshi.com)<br>
for contact, email (my first name) at (this domain)