S04 Ep1: Bringing Agentic Commerce to Market – Adam Davies, Payment Partnerships Lead, Forter

The payments industry is on the cusp of a major transformation as AI agents evolve from helpful assistants to autonomous shoppers. Agentic commerce—where AI independently finds, compares, negotiates, and purchases products on behalf of consumers—promises to revolutionize e-commerce, but it also introduces complex challenges around fraud, authentication, and customer identity in a highly regulated industry. This episode explores how the industry is racing to establish standards and protocols to make agentic commerce both secure and seamless.

 

In this episode of the Leaders in Payments and Fintech podcast, host Mark Beresford sits down with Adam Davies, Payment Partnerships Lead at Forter, to explore how agentic commerce is coming to market and what it means for merchants, payment providers, and consumers. They discuss the shift from AI as a supportive tool to AI as an autonomous actor capable of completing entire shopping journeys without human intervention. Adam breaks down the three types of AI shopping flows—referral, hybrid, and fully autonomous—and explains why the past six months have seen a flurry of protocol announcements from major players like Google, OpenAI, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard.

 

The conversation covers both sides of the agentic commerce coin: the risks fraudsters can exploit with scalable, untraceable AI-powered attacks, and the opportunities for merchants to serve customers in entirely new ways. They also tackle the shift from traditional SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and share practical advice for merchants preparing for this new reality.

In this episode: 

• How agentic commerce differs from traditional AI assistance and why it’s happening now
• The three categories of AI shopping flows: referral, hybrid, and fully autonomous
• Why fraudsters see AI as “fraud university” and how they’re exploiting scalable, untraceable attacks
• What protocols like MCP, AP2, ACP, and TAP are designed to solve for secure agent payments
• How passkeys and network tokens enable authentication without breaking the user experience
• The shift from SEO to GEO as agents replace traditional search for product discovery
• Three steps merchants should take today: audit bot traffic, consult risk vendors, and engage with PSPs​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

 

Resources:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamrdavies  

Website: https://www.forter.com/