Despite payment providers' high aspirations for agent commerce, consumer adoption will be gradual as people become accustomed to the idea of digital robots selecting goods and services. (And use credit and debit cards.)
One path to growth for agent commerce will be through people interacting with artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Nick Campbell, chief product officer at Xplor Pay, said in an interview last month. Companies that are already trusted by consumers are also likely to be early leaders in agency commerce, he said.
The company is the embedded payments division of Xplor Technologies, an Atlanta-based financial software company. Campbell joined Xplor in 2022 after holding product roles at Xero and Visa.
Scope of expectations for agent commerce Sales of $1.7 trillion According to last year's predictions from Edgar Dunn & Co., by 2030 Financial services consulting company.
Multiple companies are eyeing the potential of chat-to-commerce with Stripe. Partnered in September OpenAI and New York-based retailer Etsy are working together to drive new AI-generated sales. Stripe also indicated plans to collaborate Other AI companiesAnthropic, Microsoft, Perplexity, and more.
That same month, Google and dozens of payment companies, including Adyen, PayPal Holdings, and Worldpay, also new technology protocols Enable agent commerce transactions.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Payment Dive: One of the selling points of agent commerce is that agents handle searches and payments with less friction and wasted time. How will U.S. consumers react to the shift away from browser shopping on laptops and mobile phones?
nick campbell
Permission by Xplor Technologies
Nick Campbell: For me as a consumer and someone looking at the payments industry, this is a bit of a crystal ball. How does that feel to the consumer? Now you can interact with AI research and say, “Suggest me a local king-sized bed.” Sometimes they come back, but in that case you have to click a link to jump to the site. It feels very natural to be able to say, “Okay, buy that and send it home,” and it will use the default card you have on file. However, I think there will be challenges for consumer adoption in that consumers will need to trust the AI to hold their data securely and to see that completed transactions actually take place.
In the king-sized bed example, what would be an AI-friendly purchase, such as clothes, shoes, or a mattress?
This is where I think user adoption will be very interesting. I buy shoes because it's a (retail) company I trust. I think Amazon would be a great entry point. [agentic commerce]. Let me buy some low-level reliable items. In that context, it would really be a consumer retail space.
There's always a funny joke that goes, “I'm a millennial, and buying a plane ticket is a big screen purchase for me.” Air tickets cannot be purchased using a mobile phone. ”This is going to be one of the things that changes our behavior over time. But I need to trust it on the big screen first, so I'll probably start by buying shoes and eventually, once I've built up that trust, I'll use it to buy a plane ticket. There's always an aspect of consumer adoption that can't be quantified, and I think it comes down to trust.
Would you start with a $40 or $50 item before purchasing a three-week vacation to Australia?
Almost essentially so. And one more thing [area]I think it's often used in the field service space. If you need to hire an HVAC technician, you may be able to find out who that technician is and put down a deposit to pay for it. That still means they have to come out to my site to complete it, but it starts that deposit [payment] A process to be able to get them there. It starts with small and low-risk products until trust is built through consumer behavior.
Who owns the agent? Is it my personal representative or is it provided by the seller? And can I trust me more than the seller's agent, who may put the seller's financial interests ahead of mine in the transaction?
I think that's potentially the existential question we're all facing right now with AI. You should trust Amazon's AI because it's an extension of a company I truly trust. And I think this is going to be a real challenge for a lot of small business architectural agencies. Would you trust an AI agent named Bob if you didn't know where he came from? Bob might be built on OpenAI, but as a consumer you don't know that. So we don't even know what the security wall built around it actually is. Can I give Bob my credit card information?
Or will it be abstracted to where my AI interacts? [the agent]This is where I think a product like Gemini would be much easier to adopt for the majority of consumers. You should already see Gemini on your phone's home screen. This is what I interact with the most in the consumer space. I trust Gemini. Because Google knows everything about me right now, so Gemini is like a trusted place for me to go to. Many large e-commerce companies will need to focus on that. Will they build their own tools, or will they interact with AI tools that consumers essentially already have a trusted payment relationship with?
How does agent commerce impact sales volume?
I think more microtransactions will start to happen. Uber was kind of the first. You don't have to enter your credit card every time you use Uber. So doing microtransactions has become much easier. It felt easy. What if it became ubiquitous for me to talk to an AI and say, “Can you buy me that bottle of milk and deliver it to me?” That way, more microtransactions will occur.
