AI Agents Start Shopping and Payments Firms Adapt

Innovation in payments has historically followed a bottom-up adoption curve.

Niche players test, incumbents wait, standards emerge, and scale follows.

Agentic commerce, a model in which software agents act on behalf of consumers to search for products, evaluate options, negotiate terms and complete transactions within predefined parameters, appears to be reversing that order.

“We are seeing something different with agentic commerce where you have the largest brands in the marketplace announcing first,” Mladen Vladic, head of product, payment networks at FIS, told PYMNTS during a conversation for the February edition of the What’s Next in Payments series, “Word of the Year.”

His word of the year is agentic commerce.

Unlike past disruptions, agentic acceleration is coming from the center of gravity in retail. When Walmart announced a partnership enabling purchases through Google’s Gemini app, it signaled more than experimentation. It suggested that the world’s largest retailer is coming to view agent-mediated checkout as something inevitable.

Similar partnerships, such as Target’s collaboration with OpenAI, have underscored how quickly the agentic model is being legitimized, Vladic said, adding that when dominant retailers move early, their suppliers, partners and service providers must respond in kind.

The pace for agentic commerce, as a result, may be increasingly set not by consensus but by necessity.

“This is a transformational inflection point in the industry,” Vladic said. “Not only in this country, but globally.”

Once consumers experience agent-driven purchasing with trusted brands, expectations reset. There might not be an extended grace period for others to catch up.

From Interface Innovation to Decision Delegation

Payments innovation has historically unfolded in digestible waves, as cards replaced cash, eCommerce extended physical retail, and mobile wallets shaved seconds off checkout. Agentic commerce compresses those cycles. It does not simply reduce friction; it relocates decision-making itself, shifting it from humans to software acting under human-defined constraints.

Instead of a consumer initiating a purchase, an AI-driven agent does so, operating within pre-approved rules around price, brand preference, frequency and payment credentials.

“AI effectively functions as a personal digital agent that can source and negotiate and complete purchases using pre-approved or approved payment methods on behalf of the customer,” Vladic said, adding market estimates that now suggest that agent-mediated purchasing could account for as much as $1 trillion in retail revenue in the United States by 2030.

“That is just four short years away,” he said.

What makes this more than a consumer interface story is that these transactions do not occur outside existing financial systems.

They are executed “within the existing authorization, authentication, and then dispute frameworks,” Vladic said.

In other words, the familiar plumbing of payments, spanning networks, issuers, acquirers, fraud controls and more, all remains intact. What changes is who pulls the lever.

“Financial services are still integrated in the agentic commerce value proposition because they provide infrastructure, security protocols, and payment systems that allow AI agents to transact safely and seamlessly,” Vladic said.

Infrastructure for the Future of Consumer Experiences

From the consumer’s perspective, the shift toward agentic commerce may feel incremental at first. A grocery reorder happens automatically, or a household subscription adjusts dynamically based on usage, while a shopping app completes checkout without surfacing a payment screen. Beneath those conveniences, however, is a rebalancing of power across the ecosystem, one that rewards companies able to operate at machine speed.

In this respect, agentic commerce is unforgiving. Errors that might be tolerated in traditional checkout, such as an extra step or a confusing prompt, can carry greater weight when autonomy is involved.

“It’s all about first impression,” Vladic said. “If the customer’s first interaction with this new experience is not ideal, they may decide not to adopt that rapidly.”

Against that backdrop, Vladic pointed to another initiative as a bridge between today’s payments reality and tomorrow’s agent-driven future: Smart Baskets. Developed by FIS, the concept aims to unify network-level assets to optimize transactions in real time, factoring in least-cost routing, SKU-level intelligence and loyalty network pivots at the basket level.

“We see a tremendous opportunity to combine all of those assets to bring even better, more frictionless and more valuable experience for the customer,” Vladic said, positioning agentic commerce as “a natural extension of the ecosystem that we are building.”

If software agents are going to choose how and where transactions occur, the entities that inform those choices through routing logic, incentives and real-time data can help shape outcomes. In the agentic commerce environment, payments infrastructure becomes not just connective tissue but also a decision engine.

Asked what agentic success for FIS would look like by the end of 2026, Vladic returned to the scale of the opportunity.

“If we deliver 10% of the projected agentic volume through our agent eCommerce or Smart Basket channels by the end of this year, we’re on the right path,” he said.

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