What Is Agentic Commerce?
Agentic commerce is the emerging market where autonomous agents — not humans — purchase goods and services on machine payment rails.
How it works
Agents discover payable resources and settle via protocols: x402 (HTTP-based), Google AP2, Coinbase AgentKit.
Purchases are small, frequent, and autonomous — no human in the loop.
What's real today
The rails are live and products ship on them. Compute, data, and API access are the first categories agents buy.
The missing layer
Rails move money; they don't screen transactions. A pre-spend firewall is the control layer that makes the economy safe to scale.
FAQ
Is agentic commerce speculative?
The rails are live; what's immature is the control layer. That's the gap.
What should I do about it?
If your agents can spend, put a decision layer in front of the rail before settlement.
Related
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