AI-powered agents are already being positioned as the next interface for shopping, capable of searching, comparing, negotiating, and completing purchases on behalf of consumers and businesses. Payment providers are announcing roadmaps, card networks are experimenting with new models, and agent platforms are gaining visibility at merchant events worldwide.
What is often missing from these conversations is the merchant perspective. Merchants are the ones who ultimately accept the payment, manage fraud exposure, absorb chargebacks, and deal with regulatory consequences. Agentic payments do not remove these responsibilities. In many ways, they increase them.
By 2026, merchants will need to support agent-initiated transactions without losing control over their payment strategy. That requires a clear understanding of how agentic payments work, where risks emerge, and why orchestration becomes essential rather than optional.
Agentic payments are transactions initiated by AI agents acting on behalf of a buyer. These agents may represent an individual consumer, a business, or even another system. They are designed to operate autonomously within defined limits, making decisions based on price, availability, preferences, and constraints set by the user.
In practice, this means an agent can search for a product, evaluate multiple merchants, confirm inventory, and trigger payment without direct human interaction at checkout. From a payment perspective, this fundamentally changes how transactions begin. The buyer is still accountable, but the initiator is no longer a person clicking a button.
This shift raises immediate questions for merchants. How do you identify an agent? How do you know it has permission to pay? How do fraud systems react when behavior looks automated by design?
One of the earliest challenges merchants face is fragmentation. Card networks, wallets, PSPs, and agent platforms are not aligned on a single agentic payment model. Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, and others are exploring different approaches, each optimized for their own ecosystem.
These approaches focus on how agents communicate with payment providers, not on how merchants accept payments across multiple systems. The result is familiar. Merchants risk reliving the early days of online payments, where every provider required a separate integration and behavior varied widely.
Without a unifying layer, merchants are left to manage this complexity themselves. Either they lock into a single provider or they build and maintain multiple payment paths. This is precisely the type of problem payment orchestration was designed to solve.
From a fraud perspective, agentic payments look suspicious by default. Agents behave like bots because they are bots. Merchants are already dealing with rising levels of automated fraud, credential testing, and account takeover attempts. Fraud systems are trained to block this behavior, and rightly so.
Today, most agent-initiated transactions would be declined. There is no reliable, standardized way to distinguish a legitimate agent acting with permission from a malicious automated attack. Until that changes, merchants must assume higher risk.
This makes it critical for agentic payments to be identifiable, permissioned, and controllable at the payment layer. Merchants need the ability to route these transactions through different fraud tools, apply stricter rules, or limit exposure while they learn.
For agentic payments to work at scale, every party must authenticate every other party. The agent must be identified. The consumer must authorize the agent. The payment provider must recognize both. The merchant must approve the agent to transact. The agent must trust that the merchant is legitimate.
Any weak link increases fraud risk. Without clear permissioning, agents become a liability rather than a convenience. By 2026, merchants that experiment with agentic payments will need strong controls around who can initiate payments, under what conditions, and with what limits.
This is not just a technical challenge. It is an operational one. Merchants need visibility, auditability, and the ability to revoke access quickly when something goes wrong.
Agentic commerce amplifies an existing problem. Fake e-commerce sites already exploit search engines and social platforms. Agents, lacking intuition, are even more vulnerable. An agent searching for a product may encounter dozens of convincing but fraudulent storefronts offering unrealistic deals.
Without a way to verify merchants at scale, agents cannot reliably distinguish legitimate sellers from impostors. This exposes merchants, consumers, and payment providers to increased fraud and reputational risk.
By 2026, this creates a strong case for verified merchant directories and stronger KYB standards at the agent and payment layer. Until such standards exist, merchants must proceed carefully.
Regulation around agentic payments is still undefined. When fraud occurs, responsibility is unclear. Is it the agent platform, the wallet, the payment provider, or the merchant? History suggests merchants will bear much of the burden until rules catch up.
Higher fraud rates lead to more chargebacks. More chargebacks increase processing costs and threaten merchant accounts. For this reason, early adoption of agentic payments must be controlled and measurable. Merchants should treat experimentation as a cost center, not a guaranteed efficiency gain.
PCI compliance also becomes more complex when agents are involved. Payment data handling, token usage, and storage models must remain compliant regardless of who initiates the transaction.
A key architectural question is where agentic logic should live. If it sits at the shopping cart level, merchants risk being locked into specific platforms. If it sits entirely with PSPs, merchants lose flexibility and control.
Placing agentic payments at the payment layer allows merchants to remain independent. It enables coordination between inventory systems, order management, and payment routing without forcing a single provider choice. Ideally, the shopping layer and payment layer work together, but control remains with the merchant.
This is the foundation of the approach outlined in payment orchestration for agentic commerce.
Gr4vy’s approach introduces MCP servers deployed within single-tenant merchant instances. These servers act as an interface between agents and the payment orchestration layer, much like a frontend does for human users.
This design allows agentic transactions to be identified, routed, and managed separately from traditional ecommerce traffic. Merchants can apply custom rules, choose different PSPs, enforce limits, and experiment safely. Agent-initiated transactions are marked clearly, unlocking targeted workflows through orchestration.
This separation is critical. It allows merchants to learn what works without exposing their entire payment operation to new risks.
Agentic payments depend on secure credential storage. Wallets may sit at the card network level, within existing wallets like Apple Pay or PayPal, or within merchant-controlled vaults. In all cases, tokens act as the permission mechanism.
Gr4vy’s vaulting approach supports token generation for cards and other payment methods. Tokens can be limited by amount, frequency, or duration and protected with multi-factor authentication. This gives buyers control and gives merchants clearer boundaries around agent behavior.
By 2026, merchants that support agentic payments will need fine-grained control over token usage. Unlimited agent access is not realistic or safe.
A major advantage of orchestration is visibility. Agentic transactions can be identified, monitored, and analyzed separately. Merchants can route them through different fraud providers, apply stricter limits, or isolate them operationally.
This allows gradual adoption. Merchants can start small, learn patterns, and expand only when confidence grows. Without orchestration, agentic payments become an all-or-nothing decision.
Many open questions remain. Standards for agent authentication are still emerging. Merchant verification at scale is unsolved. Consumer behavior is unpredictable. Most agentic shopping is likely to focus on low-risk, repeat purchases rather than high-value items, at least initially.
There is also the risk of walled gardens. If agent platforms control discovery, payments, and verification, merchant choice shrinks. This makes merchant-controlled payment layers even more important.
Agentic payments are coming, but they are not a shortcut to simpler commerce. They introduce new risks, new dependencies, and new operational demands. For merchants, the goal is not to move fast at any cost. It is to stay in control while the ecosystem evolves.
What are agentic payments?
Agentic payments are transactions initiated by AI agents acting on behalf of a consumer or business. The agent selects a product, confirms availability, and triggers payment using pre-authorized credentials or tokens.
What is agentic commerce in payments?
Agentic commerce refers to AI-driven buying experiences where agents discover, compare, and purchase products autonomously. In payments, this introduces new requirements for authentication, permissioning, and fraud controls.
How do agentic payments work for merchants?
For merchants, agentic payments arrive as automated transactions that must be identified, authenticated, and routed correctly. Merchants remain responsible for fraud, chargebacks, and compliance, even if an agent initiates the payment.
Are agentic payments secure?
Agentic payments can be secure if strong permissioning, authentication, and token controls are in place. Without clear agent identification and limits, they increase fraud risk rather than reducing it.
How do merchants prevent fraud in agentic payments?
Merchants prevent fraud by identifying agent-initiated transactions, applying stricter fraud rules, limiting token usage, and routing agentic traffic separately from standard ecommerce payments.
What is the difference between agentic payments and bot traffic?
From a technical perspective, agents behave like bots. The difference is intent and authorization. Legitimate agents must prove they are authorized to act on behalf of a buyer and approved by the merchant.
Payment orchestration provides the structure merchants need to experiment safely, avoid lock-in, and adapt as standards emerge. By treating agentic payments as a payments architecture problem rather than an AI novelty, merchants can prepare for 2026 without repeating past mistakes.
Contact Gr4vy to learn how payment orchestration can help you prepare for agentic payments without giving up control of your payment strategy.
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