According to Forbes, McKinsey projects that the U.S. retail agentic commerce opportunity could reach one trillion dollars by 2030, with the global market potentially hitting five trillion dollars according to their new report “The Agentic Commerce Opportunity”. The report defines agentic commerce as shopping powered by AI agents that anticipate needs, navigate options, negotiate deals, and execute transactions, fundamentally shifting payments from a simple buyer-to-merchant handoff to a complex agent-to-merchant choreography. Recent implementations include Stripe’s integration with ChatGPT last month using their new Agentic Commerce Protocol, and PayPal’s launch just last week of their “Agentic Commerce Services” suite including Agent Ready payments and Store Sync capabilities. This emerging landscape requires payments systems to support delegated authorization, agent identity verification, programmatic spend controls, and real-time fraud detection in entirely new ways.
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The Strategic Pivot from Plumbing to Platform
The fundamental business model shift here is that payments companies are transitioning from being transaction processors to becoming commerce orchestrators. In traditional e-commerce, payment providers operated as infrastructure “plumbing” – necessary but largely invisible. With agentic commerce, they’re positioning themselves as the central nervous system that enables AI agents to discover, evaluate, and purchase across multiple merchants seamlessly. This represents a massive value capture opportunity, moving from earning tiny percentages on transaction volume to commanding premium fees for enabling entire commerce ecosystems. The race between Stripe, PayPal, and others isn’t just about processing payments faster; it’s about who controls the protocol layer that will define how AI-driven commerce operates globally.
Why This Battle Is Happening Now
The timing is strategic – we’re at the inflection point where AI capabilities have matured enough to make autonomous shopping agents viable, but the infrastructure to support them remains undefined. This creates a classic platform opportunity where the first movers who establish the dominant protocols could enjoy network effects similar to what credit card networks achieved decades ago. Stripe’s partnership with OpenAI gives them early access to the largest consumer AI platform, while PayPal’s merchant-focused approach leverages their existing relationships with millions of businesses. The prize isn’t just transaction fees – it’s becoming the essential middleware that every AI agent and merchant must integrate with to participate in this new economy.
The Financial Stakes Beyond Transaction Fees
Beyond basic payment processing, the revenue implications extend into multiple high-margin business lines. Agentic commerce enables payments companies to monetize identity verification services, fraud detection as a service, spending control management, and rich analytics about consumer behavior across multiple AI agents. The contextual tokens that Stripe mentions aren’t just technical features – they’re data goldmines that can be packaged into premium services for merchants wanting to understand how AI agents make purchasing decisions. This represents a potential 5-10x expansion in the revenue per transaction compared to traditional payment processing, justifying the massive R&D investments we’re seeing from major players.
What Legacy Players Must Do to Survive
For traditional banks and payment processors, the threat is existential. Their legacy architectures built for human-initiated transactions simply cannot handle the delegated authorization, real-time context sharing, and agent identity verification required for this new paradigm. The companies that succeed will be those that treat this as a complete architectural rebuild rather than incremental upgrades. They’ll need to develop agent-specific risk models, create new legal frameworks for delegated purchasing authority, and build developer ecosystems around their agentic commerce protocols. The window for adaptation is narrowing rapidly, and players who treat this as just another feature rather than a fundamental business transformation risk becoming the bottlenecks that get bypassed entirely.
