Agentic commerce research
Last reviewed
The market at stake
Forecasts differ in method and scope, but they agree on direction: a meaningful share of buying will be initiated or completed by agents within a few years.
- $3–5T
- of global consumer commerce could be orchestrated by AI agents by 2030, including up to $1 trillion of US retail revenue.McKinsey via Digital Commerce 360, Oct 2025 (opens in a new tab)
- $190–385B
- of US e-commerce spending from agentic shoppers by 2030, 10% to 20% of the market. Roughly 23% of Americans had made a purchase using AI in the past month.Morgan Stanley Research, Dec 2025 (opens in a new tab)
- 15–25%
- of US e-commerce, or $300 to $500 billion, could be agentic commerce by 2030. Most consumers are not yet comfortable letting AI complete a transaction end to end.Bain & Company, Dec 2025 (opens in a new tab)
- 90%
- of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated by 2028, pushing over $15 trillion of spend through AI agent exchanges.Gartner, Oct 2025 (opens in a new tab)
- $262B
- in 2025 holiday revenue, 20% of retail sales, was driven by AI and agents. Shoppers arriving from AI search converted nine times more often than social referrals.Salesforce, Jan 2026 (opens in a new tab)
Agents are already arriving
Traffic from AI assistants and agents is growing far faster than human traffic, and it converts well, which is why blocking all of it carries a cost.
- +693%
- in generative AI traffic to US retail sites over the 2025 holidays, and +670% on Cyber Monday alone.Adobe, Jan 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- 60%
- higher conversion for AI-referred retail visits than other traffic in July 2026, with 53% more revenue per visit.Adobe via Digital Commerce 360, Aug 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- 15×
- growth in AI “user action” crawling during 2025. AI crawlers were also the user agents most often fully disallowed in robots.txt files.Cloudflare, Dec 2025 (opens in a new tab)
- 47.9%
- of commerce traffic was AI bots by December 2025. Akamai also reports attackers hijacking legitimate AI assistants to abuse stored payment credentials.Akamai via GlobeNewswire, Jul 2026 (opens in a new tab)
Most traffic is now bots
Security teams now track AI agents as a category of their own, separate from good and bad bots. Few sites are fully protected.
- 53%
- of internet traffic is bots and 40% is bad bots. Thales added AI agents as a third category of automated traffic, with retail the sector most targeted by AI-driven bots.Thales, Apr 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- 2.8%
- of websites were fully protected against bots in 2025, down from 8.4% in 2024. AI bot traffic reached forms 64% of the time, login pages 23% and checkout flows 5%.DataDome via CIO Influence, 2025 (opens in a new tab)
Trust is the bottleneck
Regulators, central banks and consumers point to the same gap: proving that a customer actually authorized what an agent did.
- 11%
- of US consumers, at most, would let AI make purchase decisions, and 54% said they had to double-check information that generative AI tools gave them.Gartner, May 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- 3 barriers
- named by Federal Reserve Governor Waller: authentication, liability and fraud. “Who is on the hook if an agent makes the wrong purchase?”Federal Reserve, Sep 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- Traceability
- is a core risk, according to the IMF: agent-mediated actions may complicate tracing the origin and intent behind payments, and liability remains legally uncertain.International Monetary Fund, Apr 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- One click
- is the assumption agents break. Google notes that payment systems generally assume a human is directly clicking “buy” on a trusted surface.Google Cloud, Sep 2025 (opens in a new tab)
Industry milestones
Card networks, cloud providers and AI companies are converging on signed agents and verifiable user instructions. The open question is who enforces them at the merchant.
Apr 2025
Mastercard Agent Pay
Mastercard announces agentic payments that will require trusted AI agents to be registered and verified.
Mastercard, Apr 2025 (opens in a new tab)Jun 2025
A2A moves to the Linux Foundation
The Agent2Agent protocol becomes an open, vendor-neutral project.
Linux Foundation, Jun 2025 (opens in a new tab)Aug 2025
Cloudflare signed agents
Cloudflare extends its verified bots program so agents can prove who they are with cryptographic signatures.
Cloudflare, Aug 2025 (opens in a new tab)Sep 2025
Agent Payments Protocol
Google introduces AP2, using signed mandates as verifiable proof of a user’s instructions.
Google Cloud, Sep 2025 (opens in a new tab)Sep 2025
Agentic Commerce Protocol and Instant Checkout
Stripe and OpenAI launch shared payment tokens scoped to a specific merchant and cart total.
Stripe, Sep 2025 (opens in a new tab)Oct 2025
Visa Trusted Agent Protocol
Visa introduces agent-specific cryptographic signatures and names bot detection that blocks legitimate agents as a merchant problem.
Visa, Oct 2025 (opens in a new tab)Dec 2025
MCP joins the Agentic AI Foundation
The Model Context Protocol, with more than 10,000 published servers, moves to a new Linux Foundation home.
Linux Foundation, Dec 2025 (opens in a new tab)Jan 2026
Universal Commerce Protocol
Google announces UCP, developed with companies including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart.
TechCrunch, Jan 2026 (opens in a new tab)Mar 2026
Amazon wins an injunction against an AI shopping agent
A district court finds strong evidence that Perplexity’s Comet accessed Amazon at the user’s direction but without authorization.
CNBC, Mar 2026 (opens in a new tab)Aug 2026
Ninth Circuit vacates the injunction
The appeals court holds that the user accessed Amazon’s systems with the agent’s help. The legal line for agents remains unsettled.
US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Aug 2026 (opens in a new tab)Sep 2026
Know Your Agent interoperability
Ant International, Mastercard and Visa begin work to link each agent to a validated operator, cardholder or business.
Ant International, Mastercard and Visa, Sep 2026 (opens in a new tab)
What it means for merchants
Agents already make up a large and fast-growing share of commerce traffic, and the visits they refer convert well. Blocking all of them gives up revenue; letting all of them in gives up control.
The industry is standardizing how an agent proves its identity. The IETF Web Bot Auth charter explicitly leaves authenticating the end user out of scope. Proving that the customer approved exactly what the agent did is still the merchant’s problem, and that is the gap TrueSession closes.
Methodology: figures were checked against the linked source pages in October 2026. Forecasts use different definitions of agentic commerce and are not directly comparable. Spotted an error? Tell us.