AI Agents Disintermediate Commerce Layers
Stuart Kearney, co-founder of Vetted, on AI agents in shopping
Agentic commerce shifts power toward whoever controls both intent and payment, which puts many middle layer commerce tools in the squeeze. If an agent can answer the shopping question, compare options, and complete checkout, the layers built to steer humans across that path, ads, affiliates, retargeting, and on site conversion tools, lose surface area. The winners are more likely to be recommendation engines with trusted consumer data, or payment networks that can authorize and settle the purchase cleanly.
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The vulnerable businesses are the ones monetizing the space between search and purchase. In this interview, that includes ad networks, affiliate rails, retargeting, and store optimization tools. Vetted frames the opportunity as removing the margin spent persuading shoppers and redirecting it toward better product matching and lower friction buying.
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Payments players have the clearest structural advantage because they already store credentials, know purchase history, and handle fraud, disputes, and merchant acceptance. Stripe moved from theory to working rails with Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and its Agentic Commerce Protocol. Mastercard launched Agent Pay to make AI agents trusted participants in payment flows.
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The near term limit is that shopping is full of tiny decisions that generic agents still miss. Variant selection, shipping speed, inventory freshness, return policy, merchant trust, and fraud checks all have to line up. That is why new infrastructure players like Forter are emerging to identify agent traffic and help merchants safely accept non human buyers.
The market is heading toward a new stack where shopping agents own discovery, payments networks own execution, and merchants restructure product data so machines can read it cleanly. The biggest upside sits with companies that can turn agent intent into an approved, trusted order. Everyone else in the old click by click persuasion layer will have to move closer to data, trust, or checkout to stay relevant.