Key Takeaways
- Agentic commerce enables AI agents to autonomously buy, sell, and transact
- Needs machine-readable pricing, programmatic payments, verifiable receipts
- Different from traditional e-commerce - no human in the loop per transaction
Definition
Agentic commerce is the economic layer for AI agents to autonomously participate in commercial transactions. Unlike traditional e-commerce where humans initiate and approve purchases, agentic commerce lets machines 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. (This isn't theory - we're seeing this in production as of late 2025.)
How It Works
Agentic commerce can't work without these infrastructure components:
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
Verification
Receipts can be verified offline using Ed25519 signatures - no callback to the issuer required (watch out: key rotation needs planning)
Key Components
A complete agentic commerce stack includes:
- Machine-readable pricing - Prices in HTTP headers or structured files. Not HTML meant for humans.
- Programmatic payments - Payment rails agents can invoke without human approval - HTTP 402, stablecoins, pre-auth billing
- Verifiable receipts - Cryptographic proof for billing, compliance, disputes
- Budget constraints - Guardrails limiting autonomous spend (you set the ceiling, agent stays under it)
Use Cases
API Consumption
Agents pay for API calls on the fly. Weather data, translation, image generation. No credit pre-purchase required - they pay per call as they execute tasks.
Content Licensing
Per-use payments to creators for training data, stock images, reference materials. Attribution included.
Getting Started
To enable agentic commerce for your service or agent, Originary provides the infrastructure and tools built on open protocols: