Start here · Business leaders
Agentic commerce for business leaders
A guided path for decision-makers: what agentic commerce is, who is building it, how the money and trust work, and what it means for your business. No implementation detail required.
- 1 What Is Agentic Commerce?
The big picture in a few minutes.
A plain-language explanation of agentic commerce: AI agents that browse, choose, and pay on a person's behalf. How a transaction flows, why it is happening now, what is actually live, and who the players are.
- 2 The Agentic Commerce Landscape
Who is building what, and how the pieces fit.
A maintained map of the agentic commerce landscape: the model providers, commerce protocols, payment networks, processors, platforms, and standards bodies, and how they fit together across the stack.
- 3 How AI Agents Pay
How payment, trust, and liability actually work.
How AI agents actually pay: tokenization, signed mandates, passkeys and delegated authority, and the network products from Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Stripe, and the x402 stablecoin rail. What is live versus announced.
- 4 The Agentic Commerce Protocol Stack: ACP vs AP2 vs UCP vs MCP vs x402 vs MPP
The standards at a glance; skim the table, skip the deep dives.
A neutral, plain-language comparison of the protocols behind agentic commerce: ACP, AP2, UCP, MCP, A2A, x402, and MPP. What each one does, who backs it, and how they fit together.
- 5 Agentic Commerce Glossary
Keep this handy for the acronyms.
Plain-language definitions of the key agentic commerce terms and acronyms: agent, mandate, ACP, AP2, UCP, MCP, x402, MPP, Shared Payment Token, tokenization, passkey, merchant of record, verifiable credential, and more.
- 6 Agentic Commerce Risks and Readiness
What to watch out for, and a readiness checklist.
A neutral guide to the real risks of agentic commerce, agent impersonation, unauthorized purchases, chargebacks and liability, privacy, and channel disintermediation, how the standards address each, and a readiness checklist for getting in safely.
- 7 What Agentic Commerce Means for Your Business
The payoff: act now or wait, and first steps by business type.
A decision guide for leaders: what agentic commerce actually changes, whether to act now or wait, how to tell if you are ready, and the concrete first steps for retailers, brands, marketplaces, and service businesses.
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