Key Takeaways
- Agentic commerce enables AI agents to autonomously buy, sell, and transact
- Requires machine-readable pricing, programmatic payments, and verifiable receipts
- Different from traditional e-commerce - no human in the loop for each transaction
- Built on open protocols like HTTP 402 and PEAC for interoperability
Definition
Agentic commerce is the economic layer that enables AI agents to autonomously participate in commercial transactions. Unlike traditional e-commerce where humans initiate and approve purchases, agentic commerce allows machines to discover services, negotiate terms, make payments, and verify delivery - all without human intervention for each transaction.
Think of it as the difference between a human using a shopping website versus an AI assistant that can autonomously procure resources, pay for API calls, and manage subscriptions on your behalf.
How It Works
Agentic commerce requires several infrastructure components working together:
Policy Discovery
Agents discover available services and their terms via machine-readable files like peac.txt
Pricing Negotiation
Services advertise pricing in HTTP headers; agents evaluate and select based on budget constraints
Payment Execution
Agents make programmatic payments via HTTP 402, cryptocurrency, or pre-authorized billing
Receipt Generation
Every transaction produces a cryptographically signed receipt for audit and dispute resolution
Key Components
A complete agentic commerce stack includes:
- Machine-readable pricing - Prices advertised in HTTP headers or structured files, not just HTML for humans
- Programmatic payments - Payment rails that agents can invoke without human approval (HTTP 402, stablecoins)
- Verifiable receipts - Cryptographic proof of transactions for billing, compliance, and dispute resolution
- Policy discovery - Agents can find and understand terms of service before transacting
- Budget constraints - Guardrails that limit what agents can spend autonomously
Use Cases
API Consumption
Agents autonomously pay for API calls - weather data, translation, image generation - as they execute tasks, without pre-purchasing credits.
Content Licensing
AI systems pay content creators per-use for training data, stock images, or reference materials with automatic attribution.
Agent-to-Agent Services
Specialized agents sell capabilities to generalist agents - a coding agent purchasing compute from an infrastructure agent.
Getting Started
To enable agentic commerce for your service or agent, Originary provides the infrastructure and tools built on open protocols: