Agentic Commerce Shifts B2B Marketplaces From Intermediaries to Infrastructure

While B2B commerce leaders have for years been chasing the moving target of delivering corporate buying experiences that feel as seamless as consumer eCommerce, a new shift is emerging that could render even the most advanced consumerized B2B experience comparatively insufficient.

The rise of agentic commerce, where transactions are initiated, evaluated and executed by artificial intelligence agents acting on behalf of businesses, is poised to redefine what it means to compete in a marketplace.

The emerging agentic AI dynamic is reshaping what product experience means in B2B. The digital shelf is no longer just a merchandising exercise; it is a data engineering challenge, one that is especially poignant for online marketplaces that must normalize supplier inputs, enforce taxonomies, and ensure interoperability across procurement, logistics and payment systems.

Agentic commerce collapses the traditional separation between sourcing, contracting and settlement.

AI-driven procurement decisions depend on understanding not just what something costs, but how it can be financed, reconciled and reported in real time. Payment terms, credit availability and settlement speed become central inputs to the purchasing algorithm itself.

If aggregation defined the first generation of B2B marketplaces and workflow defined the second, payments and data structure are emerging as the connective tissue of the landscape’s agentic-driven third act.

Read also: What Agentic Commerce Can Learn From B2B Payments

Why Payments Are Moving to the Center of Agentic B2B

B2B marketplaces initially sought competitive differentiation by tactics such as verticalization and strategic investments in digital catalogs, punchout integrations, guided buying, and self-service portals designed to remove friction from traditionally manual processes, all while accommodating the complexity of enterprise procurement.

Agentic commerce changes the breadth of the marketplace perimeter as well as the discovery funnel. Instead of simply making it easier for humans to find and buy goods, enterprises are deploying AI systems that continuously monitor inventory levels, analyze usage patterns, compare supplier terms, and trigger purchases automatically when thresholds are met.

In that context, the autonomy of agentic shopping agents is elevating payments from a back-office function to a strategic differentiator. Marketplaces capable of embedding flexible payment orchestration, such as supporting virtual cards, real-time payments, dynamic discounting and automated reconciliation, may better enable the kinds of autonomous transactions enterprises seek than those that treat payments as a static checkout feature.

PYMNTS Intelligence’s November edition of the Payments Optimization Tracker® Series revealed that as agentic AI systems mature, descriptions optimized for human persuasion, like rich imagery, narrative copy and lifestyle framing, must be complemented by precise, unambiguous metadata, like specifications, dimensions, compatibility, warranties, return policies and availability in consistent formats.

Marketplaces that do not make this shift could struggle to remain visible in AI-mediated sourcing environments. If an enterprise agent cannot interpret a marketplace or supplier’s data, reconcile pricing logic or integrate payment terms programmatically, it could route demand elsewhere, often before a B2B supplier team even knew the opportunity existed.

See also: Agentic AI Needs to Solve for Trust Before Conquering B2B

Data Becomes the New Storefront

One of the paradoxes of agentic commerce is that it reduces the importance of visible choice even as it expands the universe of suppliers. Human buyers may enjoy evaluating alternatives, but AI agents prioritize confidence signals, such as clear pricing models, reliable fulfillment data and predictable payment flows.

As organizations attempt to reduce manual intervention, they are prioritizing platforms that unify purchasing decisions with payment execution and data capture. This convergence allows enterprises to minimize invoice mismatches, accelerate working capital cycles, and maintain auditability even as human touchpoints decline.

The result may be a subtle but significant repositioning. Marketplaces are becoming infrastructure providers rather than intermediaries, platforms that ensure transactions can occur reliably without human mediation.

Still, the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Tech on Tech: How the Technology Sector Is Powering Agentic AI Adoption” found a widening readiness gap between tech companies and firms in goods and services, with 75% of tech firms reporting they were extremely familiar with agentic AI, versus 33% of goods firms and 38% of services firms.

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