Agentic commerce: Will payments be the winner this time?

Although Meta and Anthropic introduced new AI shopping tools this week, agentic commerce represents under 1% of all e-commerce activity.

Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent that can autonomously complete multistep tasks such as email, travel booking, shopping and project management.

Anthropic introduced Commerce Agents, an open-source framework intended to help companies create consumer shopping agents and merchant-side operational agents, rather than a standalone shopping assistant.

Another messaging-first personal AI agent, Instinct, lets users text or call to delegate online errands and has also gone viral, at least within Silicon Valley.

These launches come after OpenAI dropped its Instant Checkout feature, while Google has focused more on infrastructure and standards than on controlling agentic payments, the note said.

Bernstein analysts said agentic commerce is often framed as a potential risk for Visa and Mastercard, but "it’s very much the opposite," citing more digitization, transactions and value-added services.

The firm said cards will remain the preferred payment method in the agentic world because of their dispute management, standards, more than 7 billion credentials and over 100 million merchants. "Any entity that tries to disintermediate cards for agentic payments is likely doomed."

According to the note, none of the recent agent launches currently seek to control merchant payments; instead, they offer frictionless ways for consumers to execute purchases, such as single-use virtual cards for Muse.

Visa and Mastercard have developed their own agentic tokens and standards, including Trusted Agent Protocol, Verifiable Intent, Agent Pay and Intelligent Commerce. Bernstein said 100% of agentic transactions will be tokenized.

Bernstein said agent-to-agent micro-payments remain in the "proof-of-concept stage," citing the x402 protocol launched by Coinbase and Cloudflare.

A year after launch, the protocol has generated roughly $0.5 million to $1 million in monthly volume, with average transaction sizes of about $0.20.

Bernstein said agentic commerce also means more complexity for merchants, creating a differentiation opportunity for processors such as Adyen. Adyen launched Adyen Agentic this summer to let enterprises sell through AI platforms without rebuilding commerce systems for each new channel.

GenAI referral traffic as a share of total referrals has risen sharply over the past two years, reaching 39% for Wayfair, 28% for Walmart, 25% for Target, 23% for Etsy and 22% for eBay as of August 2026.

However, that traffic represents only 1-2% of total traffic for these retailers. A Visa survey cited in the note found only 23% of consumers trust AI agents to conduct payment transactions on their behalf.

Bernstein rates Visa, Mastercard and Adyen "outperform."