Payments glossary
Agentic commerce
Agentic commerce is buying and selling carried out by AI agents acting on a person's or business's behalf - finding, comparing and completing purchases without the buyer clicking through a checkout. It requires payment rails that can verify an agent's authority and accept machine-initiated payments.
What changes when the buyer is an agent
An agent does not browse, hesitate or respond to persuasion. It reads structured data, compares systematically, and completes the purchase that best fits its instructions. For merchants that shifts the battleground from checkout design to machine readability - accurate product data, clear prices, explicit policies. For payments it raises a harder question: checkout flows were built to verify that the cardholder is present, and an agent, by definition, is not the cardholder.
The emerging protocol stack
Two open protocols anchor the answer. AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) handles authorisation, using signed mandates that prove a human delegated the purchase and set its limits. x402 handles execution, making payment a native step of an HTTP request under Linux Foundation stewardship, commonly settled in stablecoins. Around them, mainstream providers are moving: Adyen and Stripe both shipped agentic commerce tooling in 2026, a signal that agent-initiated payments are entering the industry's core roadmap.
Agentic payments at LekkaPay
LekkaPay's agentic payments capability is in development, covering agent authentication, mandate verification and machine-initiated payment acceptance - the current approach is published at /agentic/.
Frequently asked questions
Is agentic commerce actually happening?
Yes - early, but real. Adyen and Stripe both shipped agentic commerce tooling in 2026, and the open protocols underneath - x402 for HTTP-native payment, AP2 for authorisation mandates - are maturing under neutral stewardship. Volumes remain small next to human checkout, but the infrastructure is being laid now.
How does an AI agent actually pay?
Three patterns are emerging: delegated credentials, where the agent uses a tokenised payment method within set limits; mandate-based authorisation such as AP2, which proves what the human approved; and HTTP-native rails such as x402, often settled in stablecoins for machine-speed, low-value payments.
What should merchants do about agentic commerce today?
Make product data, pricing and policies machine-readable so agents can find and evaluate you; keep checkout free of unnecessary human-only friction; and ask your payment provider what its agentic roadmap looks like. LekkaPay publishes its approach at /agentic/.
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