American Express has published its Intent Intelligence framework to capture and authenticate customer purchase intent in agentic commerce.
US-based American Express has made its Intent Intelligence framework publicly available. The framework sets out the company’s recommended approach for capturing and authenticating a customer’s purchase intent before an AI agent completes a transaction, and for preserving that intent as a control throughout the transaction lifecycle. According to the official announcement, the company aims to help advance a common industry approach to handling intent in agentic commerce.
The framework is available through the Amex Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit. Its central difference from current implementations is timing: the customer’s authorised purchase intent reaches the issuer earlier in the transaction lifecycle, before an agent executes a purchase. The intent can then act as a control for the rest of the transaction, so that the resulting purchase matches what the customer approved.
How Intent Intelligence works
In agentic commerce, a customer tells an AI agent what they want and authorises it to buy when certain conditions are met. Intent Intelligence carries those instructions through the transaction in four stages.
First, the Create Intent API captures the customer’s purchase instructions and constraints, such as the merchant, the maximum budget, and other preferences. The customer then authenticates their identity and signs off on the intent the agent has captured. Second, the system creates an Intent ID, which is a unique identifier for that intent, along with a Proof of Intent Token that represents its high-level constraints.
Third, the token can be used to obtain a digital payment credential that the agent uses at checkout in place of the customer’s actual card number. The authorised intent sets the scope of that credential. Finally, the Intent ID and the token can serve as controls in later steps of the purchase journey. In addition, they also help validate that a purchase request matches what the customer authorised, and they support fraud prevention, authorisation decisioning, and dispute resolution.
American Express notes that the way intent is collected may vary across agentic commerce models. The framework is designed to work regardless of which party captures the intent.
Issuer perspective and dispute risk
Luke Gebb, Head of Global Innovation at American Express, said that providing authorised purchase intent before an agent transacts can give issuers more confidence that an agent is acting as the customer intended. He added that this can help issuers manage risk proactively and reduce the likelihood of costly disputes across the payments ecosystem.
American Express operates as both an issuer and a network. The company says this dual role shapes its view of trust, risk, customer control, and interoperability as AI agents begin to transact on consumers’ behalf. Intent Intelligence has been developed as a core service of ACE, and the company is building further ACE Kit integrations as the agentic ecosystem develops.
Work on industry standards
Publishing the framework openly fits with the company’s stated commitment to common, interoperable standards for agentic commerce. American Express is engaging with EMVCo to support secure card-based agentic transactions. It is also supporting the x402 Foundation’s work on standards for internet-native payments.
The question of how to verify that an agent’s purchase reflects a customer’s instructions remains central to adoption. Through the process of putting the intent signal in front of the issuer before execution, the framework approaches the problem from the authorisation side rather than relying only on checks after the transaction.
