Beyond the demo: what real agentic commerce transactions require

Agentic commerce seems to be little more than an industry buzzword. It has generated far more vision decks and sandbox demos than working infrastructure so far. In a recent webinar, hosted by The Paypers and moderated by Dwayne Gefferie, founder at Gefferie, we set out to change that framing by walking through something the industry had seen very little of so far: a real agentic transaction, processed with a real merchant and authorised by real issuers.

The panel featured the three architects behind the proof of concept: Mentxu Triviño, VP Payment Partnerships at Nuvei; Adrian Trache, Head of Product, Southern Europe at Visa; and Andreas Moos, Senior Business Development Manager for Consumer Products at Arvato Systems. Together with fashion brand Kings & Priests as the merchant, they ran a live pilot in which an AI agent purchased a product on a shopper's behalf, with the payment authorised across multiple European issuers, with no HTML simulation and no mockup; just a genuine transaction start to finish.

Here are a few of the highlights.

The architecture of trust is far more complex than meets the eye

Triviño framed the challenge succinctly: the payments industry has spent decades learning how to trust people, and now it must learn how to trust machines. She outlined a three-phase evolution: first, AI helped people find things (discovery); second, agents help people buy things (assisted commerce); and third, the phase the industry is now entering, agents buy things autonomously on behalf of people.

This progression fundamentally changes the payments conversation. Once a machine can pay on behalf of a consumer, the ecosystem must answer four critical questions: which agent is acting? Who is the agent acting for? Under what authority? And can the payment be trusted? These questions formed the backbone of the proof of concept.

Trache built on this by explaining exactly why agentic commerce is structurally different from every previous channel shift - e-commerce, mobile, social commerce - because all of those still had the consumer initiating the payment. In agentic commerce, the agent searches, evaluates, and initiates the transaction itself. That introduces a trust problem in three directions at once: can the consumer trust the agent, can the agent trust the merchant, and can the merchant trust that the agent is acting on the consumer's actual intent?

New use cases for merchants

Moos walked through what actually changes for a shopper and a merchant once an agent sits on top of the transaction. A product going out of stock, for example, stops being a dead end: the agent can notify the shopper the moment it's back (over WhatsApp, in one example) and execute the purchase immediately under pre-authorised rules, turning an out-of-stock moment into what he called a "pre-qualified demand pipeline." Price-drop alerts and recurring subscription-style refills work the same way. Critically, the agent never holds the consumer's actual card – it operates under a digital mandate with rules the consumer has set.

Moos also pushed back on the idea that autonomy is a binary switch: it's a dial. Merchants can start with lower-stakes use cases – a back-in-stock notification, a recurring pet food order – and let trust build gradually before handing over more autonomous purchasing decisions.

What's actually slowing down scale

A live poll of attendees found trust and fraud, protocols and architecture choice, and commercial readiness running in a near-three-way tie as the top concerns. Triviño's read: merchants are reasonably reluctant to commit to a single protocol standard too early, given how many are still emerging and competing – UCP, AP2, Visa Intelligent Commerce among them. Nuvei's approach is to build a protocol-compatibility layer so merchants can stay interoperable no matter which standard ends up winning, rather than betting early.

Trache tied commercial readiness directly back to trust and interoperability – once those two are solid, he argued, commercial scale tends to follow on its own. He also flagged a concrete infrastructure change already underway: Visa is introducing new data fields into authorisation and clearing requests specifically to identify the agent, confirm the consumer's mandate, and verify intent – all aimed at improving approval rates as this volume grows.

Triviño added that mandate and consent can't just cover the moment of purchase – they need to hold up through the full post-purchase lifecycle too, including returns and disputes, and agent identity itself needs to become genuine infrastructure so that if something goes wrong, there's a clear answer to who was acting, on whose behalf, and under what authority.

Where to actually start

Asked for one piece of advice each, the answers were consistent in spirit if not in wording. Trache encouraged companies to start experimenting and enabling trusted agentic commerce now rather than waiting. Moos says get to zero-defect data first – nothing else works without it. Triviño's take: skip the multi-year transformation roadmap, and instead map, concretely, what happens today if an agent tried to interact with and pay your business right now – the gaps that mapping surfaces are the actual starting point – and find a partner you genuinely trust to build it with, the same way that mattered in the early days of e-commerce.

The takeaway

What this pilot actually settled wasn't whether an agent could pay - that was never in doubt. What mattered was everything around it: issuers across borders agreeing to participate, agent identity holding up under real scrutiny, and mandate infrastructure built to survive the full transaction lifecycle, not just the moment of purchase.

As Dwayne Gefferie put it in closing, the payment was never the hard part; the orchestration behind it is. That work looks the same whether a business starts this quarter or next year: get the data right, pick partners worth trusting, and start small. Agentic commerce has moved past the theoretical stage; what's left is how fast the industry turns a working pilot into standard practice.

This webinar recap only highlights the key points of the discussion. For the full insights, watch the webinar recording here. 

About Paula Albu

 

Paula Albu has experience in content writing and editing, as well as being a creative storyteller. As a Junior Editor at The Paypers, she investigates Web3 technologies along with the latest trends and regulations in banking and fintech. Paula is committed to turning complex industry topics into engaging, accessible content that resonates with readers and creates a meaningful connection. She is available via LinkedIn or at paula@thepaypers.com.

 

About Nuvei

Nuvei is the global fintech building the infrastructure for every payment, everywhere. Its modular, flexible, and scalable technology enables leading companies to accept next-generation payments, offer all payout options, and benefit from banking, risk, and fraud management services. Connecting businesses to their customers in more than 190 markets, with local acquiring in 52 markets, 150 currencies, and over 720 alternative payment methods, Nuvei provides the technology and insights for customers and partners to succeed locally and globally through a single agreement.

For more information, visit www.nuvei.com