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It is increasingly clear that AI agents need secure payment credentials and will likely turn to existing, trusted modalities (such as corporate cards). To make this a reality, we must find ways to securely hand those card details to agents without compromising data integrity.

A recent McKinsey piece on "The Automation Curve" in agentic commerce has been making the rounds, highlighting a shift we see every day at VGS. We are moving away from a world of "search and click" toward a world of "intent and execution."

With agentic commerce, payments are no longer confined to a single checkout page or even a single platform. As merchants expand into the agentic commerce channel and the customer journey evolves, the ability to securely accept and manage payment credentials has become a core part of building a resilient revenue strategy.

We are excited to announce Agent Connect, a one-day, in-person event hosted by VGS, bringing together builders, platforms, merchants, and infrastructure leaders who are shaping the future of agentic commerce.

The facts and statistics are in, and companies are quickly adopting next-generation technology. For many, that transformation begins with agentic commerce. We break down the key trends and statistics to be aware of in 2026.

Regardless of how credentials are issued or stored, merchants today face an unavoidable reality: there are two ways credentials can reach a merchant in a transaction flow. That distinction matters more than it might appear, as it will shape how agentic commerce evolves, who controls it (or blocks it), and which merchants ultimately prevail.

Autonomous agents have begun executing purchases on behalf of consumers, and merchants are being asked to accept a rapidly expanding set of payment credentials. At VGS, we’ve already seen merchants receive or prepare to receive at least six distinct credential types from agents and AI-driven commerce platforms.

From autonomous agents executing purchases to network-level credential transformations, the payments ecosystem is entering a moment of rapid realignment in agentic commerce. Networks, issuers, and merchants all recognize that agent-driven transactions represent a new revenue surface, a new fraud surface, and a new control surface. And they’re each lobbying, loudly, for the right to shape how these transactions are accepted, routed, and evaluated.

Agentic commerce is here and continues to grow. To help merchants navigate this shift, we’re excited to launch our Agentic Commerce Guide for Merchants, a concise resource that demystifies the building blocks of agentic systems and shows merchants how to prepare for this new landscape today.

As agentic commerce becomes increasingly digital, protocol-driven interactions promise speed, privacy, and automation. However, somewhere between these mandates and emerging agentic protocols, a dangerous gap is forming, in which merchants are losing access to the data and context that have long powered fraud prevention, authorization intelligence, customer understanding, and overall business optimization.