AI agents are about to become your customers

AI agents are about to become your customers

The way people shop and pay for things is changing, and it’s changing faster than most people realise. Over the next few years, AI agents won't just help your customers decide what to buy. They'll buy it for them. This happens automatically, within rules your customers set, without them ever opening an app or entering card details.

This is agentic commerce. It is the shift from AI acting as a research assistant to AI acting as an autonomous actor in the payment journey. A customer tells their AI assistant to "sort my energy bills" or "renew my subscription if the price stays the same", and the agent handles the rest. It searches, selects, and pays on their behalf.

A space moving fast

The numbers tell a story. Morgan Stanley estimates agentic shoppers could represent up to $385 billion in US e-commerce spending alone by 2030, capturing 10% to 20% of online retail. During Cyber Week 2025, one in five orders involved an AI agent. This is happening before the technology has even reached mainstream adoption.

Investment is following this signal. Visa and Mastercard have both debuted new agentic AI products in recent months. Each is racing to ensure their credentials are the default method when an AI agent makes a payment. Stripe has launched its Machine Payments Protocol and Google has its Universal Commerce Protocol. The biggest names in global payments are building infrastructure that assumes one thing: when an agent pays, it pays by card or stable coins (for now…).

Where account-to-account policy meets agentic AI

Against this backdrop, the UK Government's National Payments Vision sets out a clear ambition. account-to-account (A2A) payments, where money moves directly between bank accounts rather than via card networks, should become a ubiquitous payment method. The Vision calls for seamless A2A payments as a genuine alternative to cards.

However, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and others are already embedding card credentials as the default for agent-initiated payments. A2A barely features in the current agentic commerce landscape. Left unaddressed, the competition the Vision is designed to create could be bypassed before it has a chance to materialise. 

Card rails were built for humans to swipe, not for software to execute. They rely on expiry dates, physical security codes, and manual interventions that are incompatible with a fully automated economy. Extending this model into agentic commerce reinforces dependency on card schemes, at precisely the moment when the UK has an opportunity to rebalance its payments ecosystem.

Why A2A is naturally suited to agentic commerce

At GoCardless, we think this risk is real, but we also think it's solvable. Our core belief is that account-to-account payments are structurally better suited to the way agentic commerce needs to work.

Think about what agentic payments actually require. Users need the ability to set limits on what an agent can spend and in which categories. They need to pause, adjust, or revoke permission instantly; what we call structured delegation. These aren't features card rails were designed for. However, these are exactly the capabilities that Direct Debit and Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) are built around.

Our own research backs this up. We surveyed 300 payers and found that 61% would grant an AI agent some control over their payments, provided there are guardrails. Over half said they would require final approval on transactions up to £25. Payers want structured delegation, not full delegation. This is a problem that account-to-account is better placed to solve than card-based alternatives.

Merchants are showing interest, too. We found that 21.7% of surveyed merchants would be willing to run agentic pilots. This is a meaningful early signal in a space that is still forming.

Leading the way into secure and trusted agentic commerce

We’re not just making the case in theory. Over the past months, we’ve been running internal hackathons to demonstrate live, agent-initiated A2A payments. We’ve engaged with emerging protocols and conducted research with payers and merchants to understand trust and appetite.

Now we’re taking the next step. GoCardless has been invited to join the FCA’s AI Live Testing programme to accelerate a trusted and secure method of A2A agentic payments. This is a supervised environment where we will work with the FCA and other ecosystem stakeholders to test agentic A2A payment capabilities. We aren't building in isolation. We are helping to shape what a safe, trusted, and commercially viable agentic A2A framework looks like from the inside.

This work is essential if account-to-account is to become a genuine alternative to cards in an agentic world. The Vision sets the ambition, the FCA programme creates the space, and GoCardless intends to help define what is possible.

Watch this space

Agentic commerce is not a distant scenario. It is forming now, with standards and payment defaults being set in real time. The question of which payment methods agents choose will matter enormously for merchants, payers, and the health of the UK payments ecosystem.

We have a clear point of view on where account-to-account fits, and we are committed to proving it. This is the first in a series of updates as we move from research into live testing. More to follow.