Agentic payments, agentic discovery: what do these terms mean in practice? This section defines them, explains how agents change the relationship between buyer, merchant, and payment, and lays out the stages in the shift from assistive AI to delegated spending.
Commerce has reinvented itself twice in twenty-five years, and each time the payment system had to be rebuilt to match.
Agentic is the third stage, and it is arriving faster than the infrastructure built for the first two can absorb. McKinsey projects agentic commerce could drive $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global consumer transactions by 2030, with up to $1 trillion in the US retail market alone.
2000s
Stage 1
2000s
Stage 1
Humans browse and click. Digital PSPs emerge.
2010s
Stage 2
2010s
Stage 2
Humans tap to pay. Wallets and tokenization arrive; the iPhone resets checkout.
Today
Stage 3
Today
Stage 3
Agents browse, compare, and advise. Consumers already use AI, but most purchases still complete on traditional flows.
At each stage, it was not only the interface for purchasing that changed. Both consumer behavior and the payment layer had to be re-engineered before the new model could scale. The companies that built the rails early set the terms for everyone who arrived later. Agentic is the stage still being defined, and the first live proofs are already here.
Agentic commerce only works if the whole payments industry moves together: AI platforms, card networks, banks, and merchants. No one company can build the connection between them alone.
Hilla Peled
SVP of Data Science and AI, Nuvei
"Agentic commerce," "AI-driven purchasing," and "LLM shopping discovery" are terms frequently used interchangeably across the industry, but they describe different things.
Agentic commerce is the medium through which consumers start making purchases. And it has two phases: the AI-led discovery phase, happening today and the agentic payment phase, which is still being built. One is about where decisions are made; the other is about how the money moves. Let's break them down.
Agentic payments are the next step. The consumer sets a mandate in advance, say a limit of two hundred dollars on a defined task. The agent then initiates and completes the transaction itself, inside its own environment, with no redirect to a merchant checkout.
The point of initiating the payment moves from the human, the way it was done in the eCommerce world, to the machine.
That shift - from a person initiating the payment in the AI-discovery and eCommerce stage to one where an agent makes the payment on the user's behalf - is where the current infrastructure has the biggest bottleneck.
For decades, the payments infrastructure relied on a human at every stage of the purchase. A transaction with no human at the checkout has to carry trust in two directions at once: trust in the consumer, validated as it is today via KYC, and trust in the agent acting for them, validated via new protocols, such as Know Your Agent.
As Mentxu Trivino, VP of Payments Partnership at Nuvei puts it:
The question is no longer whether a payment can be processed. It is who, or what, is authorizing it, what that actor is allowed to do, and who is liable when something goes wrong.
This next era of agentic commerce requires a different infrastructure and different rules of governance, making sure the agent initiating the payment is verified, trustworthy, and carries the credible user intent. This is exactly where Nuvei is building.
There is a second distinction that decides how merchants meet this shift. A first-party agent is one a merchant runs itself, inside its own site, app, and customer relationship. A third-party agent is a public assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini that acts across many merchants at once. The two raise different trust questions, and the merchants Nuvei works with are clear that they will meet the first-party version first. That ordering shapes everything Nuvei is building.
But before we get into that, let's see what consumers have to say about how they use AI when making purchases.
BLOG
As AI agents start shopping and paying on behalf of consumers, Know Your Agent becomes the new trust layer in payments. How PSPs and acquirers can govern agent identity, mandates, and local execution.
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