Agentic Commerce in plain English.

Agentic commerce is buying and selling where at least one side is an AI agent. On the consumer side, an assistant finds products, compares options, tries clothes on a photo of you, and checks out within limits you set. On the merchant side, agents manage listings, pricing, and inventory. The pieces arrived together in autumn 2026: Mastercard's Agent Pay and AgentCard give agents cryptographically verified purchasing credentials with spending caps; Amazon launched agents for sellers; ChatGPT added virtual try-on and a Favorites library on October 1; and Meta Muse and OpenAI's Dots can run errands that end in a purchase. For shoppers the practical questions are limits, confirmation steps, and refunds. For merchants, agent traffic becomes identifiable, product data must be machine-readable, and pricing dynamics change when everyone's agent reprices against everyone else's. For the industry, it is the moment "assistant" becomes "delegate", and the controls around spending become the product.