Are we there yet? Industry tea on what’s going on in agentic commerce, as of Dec 2025. Major props to Grace Wu and the Payment Operators Series group on Luma for organizing this panel convo down at the new Visa HQ in Mission Bay. Many old friends, some new ones and great convos. Notes & highlights:
Jalpesh Chitalia kicked us off with a narrative of how far we’ve come from 2023 to today.
– In our current state, consumers are embracing agents for search and discovery. But checkout and payment is still human led.
– Arguably, merchant-side have been using AI even longer, using algorithms for pricing, marketing, recommendations, risk etc. and now gen ai too, but all for their human-facing channels
– What is now just emerging is end-to-end agentic shopping journeys and agent-to-agent fully autonomous commerce
– But for trust and interoperability to work there are many pieces including protocol and standards [that tbf Jalpesh and his team at Visa have been doing a killer job at executing on] including how to trust and certify agents, protect & control payment credentials in an AI environment, manage identity & authorization, navigate post-purchase actions etc.
– Past year was somewhat ‘chaotic’ with many players introducing protocols, all with good aspects, now we’ll see these consolidating and maturing
Panel w/ Aarti Bharathan (ex. Google Payments), Prerit Uppal (doordash), Nemil Dalal (YC, ex Coinbase) and Bharat Melag (Visa)
Aarti – journey to full automation is still where it was last year. We thought trust was key last year, but if we look upstream there is still hallucination and humans needing to be in the loop. [my take: it’s all about the usecase, expect agentic commerce to take off first in niches where stakes are low but value high. ‘Claude, help me pick gifts for a niece’s 6yo birthday’, ‘GPT I need instructions for a basic DIY home repair, can you also identify and source the right tools and parts and tell me when they’ll arrive?]
Bharat – At the network level, well need new dispute and reason codes
Nemil – X402 [Coinbase payment standard] can be used by agents. X402 micropayments could replace ad revenue as a way to pay for traffic and content access. Monetizing online content is a need if we want to keep having quality content, but ads (besides being toxic themselves). [agentic commerce can be about creating new categories of payments, not just replacing current shopping journeys]
Aarti – agents will negotiate for the best outcome not necessarily the best price. And this will change how loyalty works
Prerit – [merchant perspective] We ask first who will be the merchant of record, who/how will disputes be managed, how will it impact customer Trust and relationships? With narrow margins, we both don’t have luxury to test every protocol
Aati- building an mcp is no regrets for merchants. Just go dabble with that. Next step do you want to support commerce or ai negotiation