How this differs from ordinary checkout automation
Ordinary e-commerce automation still waits for a person to click buy. Agentic commerce moves that decision inside the agent itself, so the checkout step disappears rather than getting faster. Visa and Mastercard have both started settling agent-initiated purchases on live card rails this year, which is a different claim than a chatbot that fills out a form for you.
The missing layer is identity
The part still being built is identity: something equivalent to Know Your Customer, but for software. Nuvei calls it Know Your Agent, a registry that credentials an agent, checks its mandate, and keeps a log you can point to after the fact. I wrote about that shift in Know Your Agent is the new Know Your Customer.
Underneath that sits a standards fight
ACP, AP2, MCP and now Google's Universal Commerce Protocol are all competing to be the way an agent proves it is allowed to spend, and nobody has won yet. I have tracked that fight edition by edition, starting with Five protocols, one checkout.
I run a daily news desk on exactly this, sourced from primary announcements rather than press summaries, because the story moves week to week and a summary lags behind it. For the regulatory side colliding with the same deadline, Nine days out, the stablecoin rulebook finally gets numbers is a good place to see how the payment side and the identity side are landing at once.
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