Agentic Payments In B2C Commerce: Where We Are Now

In November we answered five questions on the state of agentic payments and provided a key timeline of critical announcements up to that point. It’s time to take a fresh look. To summarize the biggest updates since my last post, the headlines are:

Consumer adoption of agentic commerce remains low and relatively stagnant. Per Forrester data, US consumer adoption of OpenAI’s Instant Checkout remained low and stagnant from debut to discontinuation. Consumer interest in AI agents making purchases for them remains lukewarm, but it’s growing. Among US online adults, Millennials and men remain the most interested groups in AI shopping agents, per Forrester’s data.

Agent-to-agent has entered the chat (so to speak). Early on, Google launched an Agent2Agent protocol to facilitate communication and collaboration between AI agents. Now, Stripe and Tempo (with Visa as a design partner) have recently launched their Machine Payment Protocol (MPP) for AI agent-to-AI agent payments. A use case that Stripe cites in the press release is AI agents autonomously paying a fee to a network provider per API call for web access. This will likely take off in B2B payments first, where payments are highly repeatable and where agent-based automation is already taking off for managing complex upstream workflows.
Merchant payment providers’ strategies are to be “connectors”. Merchant payment providers (e.g., Adyen, PayPal, Stripe, and WorldPay), like most payment ecosystem players, have their work cut out for them. They are building MCPs to make their services accessible via AI agents. They are building capabilities around and certifications for the many protocols and frameworks out there. Initially, most are focused on Google’s UCP and OpenAI’s ACP, but they are also building support for Know Your Agent protocols and AI agent-specific payment tokens from the payment networks (e.g., Mastercard, Visa) and others (e.g., Trulioo).

Where are we now?

Announcements are still flying left and right. Let’s review the key events in agentic payments in B2C e-commerce since mid-November 2025 (for a timeline predating that, please see my last post). In order of recency:

MARCH 2026

Gap announced its partnership with Google to support shopping within the Gemini app. The capabilities were still in testing (i.e., not live yet). Gap’s Chief Technology officer told CNBC that Google’s UCP gives merchants more control over the shopping experience than OpenAI’s ACP. (March 24, 2026)
Google added new capabilities to its Universal Commerce Protocol, including an AI-agent-specific shopping cart, product catalog access, and identity-linking (for loyalty or membership purposes). It also said it has simplified merchant onboarding to UCP and announced that partners Stripe and Salesforce will be implementing UCP on their solutions in the future. (March 19, 2026)
After disappointing results from Instant Checkout, Walmart announced it will embed Sparky, its consumer-facing AI agent, into ChatGPT (first) and Google Gemini (later). (In the Wired interview with Walmart, the retailer said it had “three times lower conversion rates for the selection sold directly inside the [ChatGPT Instant Checkout] chatbot than those that require clicking out.”) It is unclear if Sparky will handle payments directly, but Walmart is aiming to enable a persistent shopping cart and loyalty “earn and burn” through Sparky. Per The Tech Buzz, Walmart is also in discussions with Anthropic to embed Sparky in Claude. The Tech Buzz further reports that Walmart said data from its pilot of Sparky in ChatGPT showed those users convert at roughly 70% of the rate of those using Walmart.com directly. (March 18, 2026)
Stripe and Tempo, a blockchain company, announced their Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) and opened requests for early access. “MPP provides a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically.” In other words, Stripe and Tempo have built this standard to enable AI agents to autonomously make payments without humans in the loop. A use case that Stripe cites in the press release is AI agents autonomously paying a per API call for web access. (March 18, 2026)
Visa announced it was extending support of Stripe and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) for card-based transactions in its Visa Acceptance Platform. It released technical specifications and an SDK for implementing it and stated that these capabilities are part of the Visa Intelligent Commerce infrastructure and thus aligned with Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol. (March 18, 2026)
Amazon announced support for feeds so merchants can intentionally send their products to its Shop Direct experience though partners CEDCommerce, Feedonomics, and Salsify. Amazon can redirect consumers to the merchant’s sites or can direct Amazon to deploy a “Buy For Me” AI agent to complete the purchase on their behalf using their primary Amazon address and credit card. (“Buy For Me” was released for beta testing in April 2025 and received backlash from merchants.) Read Forrester’s take on Amazon’s potential paths forward in agentic commerce here. (March 11, 2026)
OpenAI is shutting down Instant Checkout in favor of its ChatGPT Apps strategy and improving product search and discovery features in its established consumer-facing ChatGPT experience. ChatGPT Apps do not currently support payments directly in the apps, instead, they instruct merchants with apps to direct consumers to their established digital checkout experiences. (March 4, 2026)
Mastercard, Santander, and PayOS successfully completed “Europe’s first live end-to-end transaction executed by an AI agent” using the bank’s live payment infrastructure and Mastercard Agent Pay in a controlled environment. Santander announced it will continue testing, researching use cases, and establishing partnerships. Mastercard stated that the announcement “does not constitute a commercial rollout at this stage.” (March 2, 2026)

FEBRUARY 2026

 Amazon and OpenAI announce a partnership, including Amazon’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI. Read Forrester’s take here. (February 27, 2026)
Stripe, an early cheerleader for (and builder of) agentic commerce, admits in its 2025 annual letter that “agentic commerce suffers from having been overhyped too early in some corners” but that it “has the potential to be generationally impactful” if universal interoperability is achieved . It lays out its vision for the five-stage evolution of agentic commerce in the letter and says we’re in stage one or two. (February 24, 2026)
 Alipay announced that its AI Pay solution reached a 120 million transaction milestone. Transactions were driven primarily from Alipay’s integration into Qwen App, Alibaba’s flagship consumer facing AI application, where consumers could buy from Taobao Instant Commerce (mainly food and beverage purchases). For context, Alibaba later reported in March 2026 that Qwen App had 300 million active users. (February 13, 2026)

JANUARY 2026 

Alibaba launched its Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol in collaboration with many Alibaba child companies or Alibaba-backed companies: Qwen App, its flagship consumer-facing AI application, Taobao’s Instant Commerce, Rokid Smart Glasses, Damai – an entertainment company, and Alibaba Cloud’s Bailian platform. The protocol includes two payment models: instant payment, and delegated authorization which enables users to give AI agents pre-set conditions to complete payments at a later time autonomously. As part of the announcement, Alibaba integrated Alipay into Qwen App in an initial public testing phase. Initially, consumers can use Alipay to make purchases from Taobao’s Instant Checkout within the Qwen App AI chat experience. (January 16, 2026)
Google and Apple put out a joint statement announcing a “a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology.” Apple has a pre-existing relationship with OpenAI where Apple users can direct Siri, the virtual assistant, to use ChatGPT to surface results to voice prompts. There is no indication as of April 2026 that Apple will adopt Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol or that Siri would be able to make purchases for Apple users on it. (January 12, 2026)
Mastercard and Visa partner with FIS, a financial technology provider for financial institutions. The partnership aims to help issuing banks leverage the card networks’ AI agent authentication (“Know Your Agent”) and related payment credential tokenization capabilities to “identify and authorize agent-initiated transactions and support related compliance efforts” as well as enable banks to put fraud protections in place. (January 12, 2026)
Google announced at NRF the launch of its Universal Commerce Protocol in partnership with Etsy, Shopify, Target, Wayfair, and Walmart, and “endorsed by” a others including Adyen, American Express, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, Visa, and Worldpay. It is compatible with Google’s previously announced Agent2Agent (A2A) and Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and with Model Context Protocol (MCP). The protocol will initially support consumers to checkout from merchants directly from Google’s AI mode or in the Gemini App using Google Pay, and “soon” with the option for PayPal. (January 11, 2026)
Stripe and Microsoft announce Copilot Checkout. Consumers will be able to buy from select merchants in Microsoft Copilot via its integration with Stripe, which will deliver the merchant data via the Agentic Commerce Protocol it co-developed with OpenAI, and the payments will be processed using Stripe’s Shared Payment Token. (January 8, 2026)

DECEMBER 2025

Visa announced that “hundreds of secure, agent-initiated transactions have now been successfully completed” in early pilots of Visa’s Intelligent Commerce solutions with partners like Nekuda, PayOS, Ramp, and SkyFire. (December 18, 2025)
Visa and Akamai announced a partnership where Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol will complement Akamai’s behavioral intelligence, user recognition, and bot intelligence to authenticate AI shopping agents and help prevent fraud in agentic commerce use cases. (December 17, 2025)

LATE NOVEMBER 2025

PayPal and Perplexity launch Instant Buy, where PayPal merchants can opt to become discoverable in Perplexity users in the US. Consumers will be able to checkout directly within Perplexity using PayPal. (November 25)
Worldpay launches its Worldpay MCP, a way for merchants to integrate Worldpay’s APIs into AI agents. (November 24)
Mastercard‘s Agent Pay processed its first transaction outside of the US in The United Arab Emirates (UAE) in a pilot with retail and lifestyle conglomerate Majid Al Futtaim group. The UAE is a unique market of digital, fintech, and AI innovation. (November 19)