Agentic Commerce Shifts From AI Hype to Operational Infrastructure
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire · Based on a photo by Quintin Soloviev (CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
A new report on Québec's fintech ecosystem reveals a race among global payment giants to standardize the protocols powering autonomous transactions.
Agentic commerce—where AI systems handle the entire consumer journey from product discovery to payment—is moving toward a functional market, according to a report from innovation hub Station FinTech Montréal and Fathom4sight. As detailed by BetaKit, the focus has shifted from AI's ability to make decisions to the creation of ecosystems that translate those decisions into trusted transactions.
A race to establish the industry's "rulebook" is underway, with several major players launching competing frameworks. BetaKit reports that Mastercard introduced Agent Pay in April 2025, while Visa launched its Intelligent Commerce initiative the following day. Further efforts to standardize agent interactions include Google's Agent Payments Protocol (September 2025), Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol—supported by Montréal-founded Nuvei—and the Universal Commerce Protocol from Google and Shopify. Other notable efforts include the Agentic Commerce Protocol by OpenAI and Stripe, and the cryptocurrency-based x402 protocol.
These initiatives target four critical functions: agent identity, delegated payment authority, checkout orchestration, and settlement. However, the report notes that merchants currently face a fragmented landscape, as the market has "standardized before it settled." To address this, Google donated its protocol to the FIDO Alliance in April 2026 to ensure platform agnosticism, and Visa launched Intelligent Commerce Connect to allow single-merchant integration across card networks.
Despite the technical progress, operational hurdles remain. BetaKit notes that OpenAI shut down its Instant Checkout feature in March due to inventory and pricing inaccuracies. Surinderjit Kaur Bhatti, CEO and Founder of Fathom4sight, stated that the critical breakthrough is the development of ecosystems that enable trusted transactions, noting that organizations embracing interoperability will be best positioned for the autonomous economy.