The news: Walmart’s OnePay adopted Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to drive agentic commerce as a credentialled provider, per a press release.

OnePay will help Google’s AI agents:

• Define users’ spending limits, merchant parameters, and reuse controls.
• Ensure safe access to card, bank accounts, and digital wallets.
• Offer financing choices to agents, such as interest-bearing installment loans with transparent disclosures.
• Enable multi-wallet use for agents to choose certain payment methods for particular purchases.

How we got here: Agentic commerce is slowly on the rise, with providers like OpenAI and Stripe, Klarna, Google, Visa, Mastercard, and Splitit all developing their own protocols to enable AI-powered shopping. 

For major retailers like Walmart, protocol adoption means that its products become discoverable on more agent-enabled platforms—see its partnership with OpenAI— and its financial services offered through OnePay snag more volume. 

Who’s using agents? Not that many people—for now. 61% of Gen Zers and 57% millennials have used AI during their shopping journeys within the last year, per PayPal’s Holiday Shopping Survey, but most are deploying artificial intelligence for consumer research, rather than enabling agent-led checkouts.

Retailers are most likely to pick up these consumers’ spend on agentic commerce as shoppers adjust to these platforms.

Our take: With the flurry of protocols hitting the market, merchants trying to benefit from the rise of new payments technology face significant confusion determining which protocols to align with to ensure safety and privacy for their consumers. Some merchants are staying on the sidelines for now: Amazon blocked agents from its merchant platform. 

With Chrome remaining consumers' most popular browser, Gemini is narrowing the gap with ChatGPT as the most used chatbot: We forecast that by 2029, Gemini will hold 53% of genAI market share. That in turn could give Google’s AP2 a large share of agent-driven consumer spend in the long term, as consumers develop loyalty and use patterns around AI platforms.