The news: Payment providers can gain loyalty from merchants if they help them prepare for agentic commerce, per American Express’s Trendex research.

• 83% of surveyed businesses believe agentic commerce is an opportunity.
• 61% of businesses agree the pace of AI innovations is difficult to keep up with.
• And 86% of surveyed businesses say that they will need at least moderate support from payment providers and partners to prepare for agentic commerce.

Why this matters: Merchants understand that agentic commerce could bring them significant volume. Sixty-two percent said they expect AI agents shopping on behalf of consumers to moderately to significantly impact their business in the next year, per Trendex.

We forecast that US AI-driven retail ecommerce sales will grow by 73.3% YoY in 2027 to $75.15 billion. 

Implications for payment providers: Preparing merchants for agentic commerce will have to happen in tandem with preparing consumers, who are widely apprehensive about giving a robot control of their credit card information. Twenty-four percent are concerned about agents compromising their data security, and 21% are worried about agents going rogue. 

Payment providers can help merchants boost consumers’ trust in agentic tools by developing useful AI agents for their storefronts that help with customer concerns. For example, starting with a tool that gives customers alerts about price drops during sales could later make them more willing to let a bot buy those goods when they fall under a certain price point on their behalf, kick-starting more full-scale agentic commerce buy-in.

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