Agentic AI will change the way you do business
– there, I said it. No take-backs.
Picture this: you fire up your favorite AI assistant and casually say, “Hey, buy me a new couch.” In milliseconds, it remembers you hate leather (you’re still scarred from that one sticky summer), knows your living room dimensions down to the inch, and recalls that your heart beats a little faster for the color blue.
That’s today’s AI. Tomorrow’s Agentic AI goes one step further: it doesn’t just help you search, it acts. It scours thousands of product databases, weighs prices, loyalty perks, delivery schedules, and even your preferred payment method (Apple Pay over credit card? ACH for cashback? Crypto because you’re feeling rebellious?)—all to find your couch. Then it either buys it for you (delivery and removal included, thank you very much) or politely presents a few “best” options, just in case you’re picky.
Why Merchants Should Be Nervous (And a
Little Excited)
This isn’t a tiny upgrade—it’s a tectonic shift. Merchants aren’t just selling to humans anymore; they’re selling to algorithms with perfect recall and zero patience for fluff.
Here are the questions that should keep you up at night (but in a fun, future-is-wild sort of way):
- Do we still need fancy merchant websites?
If the AI is doing the shopping, your dropdown menus and snazzy carousels may matter less than the quality of your product data. (Sorry, UX designers.) - Is your database AI-friendly?
Think beyond SKU numbers. A couch isn’t just “blue” and “sofa.” It’s 84 inches wide, stain-resistant, mid-century modern, made of recycled ocean plastic, and ships in 3 days with free assembly. Every one of those details is ammo for the AI. - How will you differentiate?
Forget glossy marketing copy—Agentic AI doesn’t swoon over adjectives. Instead, think structured data: how do you make your products “pop” for an algorithm that compares specs, payment flexibility, and loyalty rewards with machine precision?
Payments: The Secret Battlefield
Payments aren’t just the boring step at checkout anymore—they’re part of the value proposition. Your AI agent might decide between two identical couches because one comes with:
- Preferred payment options (do you support tokenized wallets, RTP, or the customer’s loyalty-rich credit card?)
- Rewards stacking (5% back for Pay-by-Bank plus free delivery through a partner program = a win).
- Lower risk of returns or disputes (some networks might flag a merchant with high chargeback ratios, steering AI away).
- Refund flexibility (instant refunds through faster payments vs. 5–7 business days on a card—guess which the AI likes?).
- Security signals (biometrics, 3-D Secure 2.0, tokenization—your AI doesn’t mess with fraud).
- Authorization Rate (if the shopper is not recognized merchant, processor or issuer systems may be more likely to decline a transaction
Oh, and let’s not ignore the elephant in the showroom: chargebacks. If an AI makes the purchase, can the human still claim they didn’t authorize it under today’s card network rules? That’s a payments law school final exam waiting to happen.
And then there are returns: what happens when you hate the couch your AI picked, but the merchant says “Hey, don’t blame us, blame your robot”? Consumer protection is about to get…interesting.
The In-Store Wildcard
If buying becomes fully automated, physical shopping has to evolve into something more than buying. Think entertainment, curation, human touch. Walking into a store might feel less like errand-running and more like attending a mini-event: “Come for the free coffee, leave with the couch your AI already picked out.”
By: Dean Sheaffer Founder and CEO of Team PayTech.