Trust in the Age of Agentic Commerce

A new era of commerce is emerging – one powered by intelligent AI agents that can act on behalf of consumers and businesses. In this world, AI doesn’t just recommend where to travel or what to buy; it books flights when prices drop, reserves hard-to-get tables, and seamlessly applies rewards, offers, and points to deliver more value.

For more than 175 years, American Express has earned the loyalty of our customers by combining innovation with our brand promise of trust, security, and service. Today, we’re extending that same promise into the era of AI-led commerce – not just for our customers, but for the industry.

Why Standards Matter Now

We believe agentic commerce will only scale when participants, including customers, AI agents, merchants, networks, and platforms, can interact safely and seamlessly. That’s why having strong, shared standards matter more than ever.

Imagine a customer wants an agent to help plan a trip for their family, from choosing the destination to purchasing flights, booking hotels, and making dinner reservations. For the agent to make these purchases on the customer’s behalf, across various merchants, it is beneficial to have open, interoperable standards. Open, interoperable standards allow for scaled integrations, understanding of the purchase context for all parties across the transactions, data sharing to protect consumers and merchants, and the ability to tie the end transaction back to the original intent.

Amex’s Unique Vantage Point

As a global payments network, issuer, and acquirer, American Express sits at a unique intersection within the commerce ecosystem. As a result, we understand the needs of consumers, merchants, issuers, and networks - and can help bridge perspectives with AI players and platforms to make agentic commerce work for everyone.

With our unique role across the payments ecosystem, we’re looking to build agentic experiences that feel effortless and safe through partnerships and proprietary innovation.

From Vision to Action: Defining Standards

As a company, we’re directly shaping the frameworks needed for agentic commerce through our work with key stakeholders. This week, EMVCo, the technical body that creates and manages EMV® Specifications and programs that enable seamless and secure card-based payments worldwide, announced that they are exploring how EMV Specifications can be developed and enhanced to promote seamless and secure card-based agentic payments. As a member of EMVCo, Amex will be actively engaged in EMVCo’s agentic commerce efforts.

The engagement with EMVCo is just our latest contribution to the development of agentic commerce standards. We are also a contributor to emerging frameworks such as Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and most recently announced we are working with Cloudflare to use their Web Bot Auth Protocol within our agentic commerce program.

Building the Agentic Future, Together

As AI transforms commerce for our customers, American Express is helping define principles and standards to ensure we deliver on our brand promise of trust, security and service.