Agentic commerce: Is Payments the winner this time?

The emergence of agentic commerce, driven by new AI tools from Meta and Anthropic, is reshaping the e-commerce landscape, but not in the way many might expect. While agentic commerce represents less than 1% of current activity, payment giants like Visa and Mastercard are positioned to benefit. Bernstein analysts suggest that cards will remain the preferred payment method due to their established infrastructure, dispute management, and over 7 billion credentials in circulation. This indicates that any attempts to disintermediate card networks in agentic payments are unlikely to succeed. For Asia, this trend suggests that existing payment network dominance will likely extend into the AI-driven commerce era. Companies like Adyen, which launched Adyen Agentic to help enterprises integrate with AI platforms, could find significant opportunities in simplifying complex merchant operations. The focus on tokenization, with Bernstein forecasting 100% of agentic transactions to be tokenized, also points to a need for robust security and standardization across Asian markets as these technologies mature.