Spend through agentic commerce – where shoppers use an AI agent to find and buy goods and services, often autonomously – will reach $1.5 trillion by 2030; growing from only pilot deployments in 2025 and 2026.
A study by Juniper Research found, however, that despite strong predicted growth, trust will remain the number one barrier to agentic commerce deployment.
Over time, as AI product discoverability, AI agent use and trust grow, agentic commerce will develop into an important access channel, but will not replace traditional ecommerce checkouts for the foreseeable future.
An extract from the report, Agentic Commerce Market 2026-2031, is available as a free download
Impact on telemedia
While agentic commerce is seen largely as something that will impact online retail, it will also have a part to play in how telemedia evolves. As we reported in July 2025, AI agents could autonomously select, subscribe, or purchase digital content or streaming services based on user criteria such as mood, price, content type – reducing friction in discovery and conversion. This could bring about a wholesale change in how mVAS services drive traffic as it would be looking for agentic AI to find services not humans.
The user’s interaction may shift to giving high-level instructions such as “Find me the best subscription for live sports this month” – the agent then comparing, signing up, managing recurring payments, and cancelling when needed.
All this sort of circumvents perhaps the more ‘marketing’ based approach of trying to look enticing on TikTok, with the AI looking beyond that for the hard facts of what is best value for money – and being able to cancel on a whim if something better comes along.
It will also bring about a wholesale change in how people pay for mVAS. Autonomous agents will need to support existing billing rails, including direct carrier billing – especially important for pay-per-use, in-app purchases, subscriptions, or for users without credit cards.
Compliance challenges will increase, with regulators requiring robust consent protocols, audit trails and fraud prevention to ensure agents do not make unauthorised mobile payments.
Such agentic commerce is also expected to accelerate the use and innovation of alternative payment methods – not least tokenised wallets, account-to-account transfers, buy now pay later, crypto and digital wallets, all of which will be orchestrated by agents.
As a result, platforms and merchants must expose payment options and data via APIs in machine-readable formats so agents can process transactions efficiently, transparently and securely.
Leaders in emerging ecosystem
Meanwhile, as part of its study, Juniper Research released its 2026 Competitor Leaderboard for Agentic Commerce Payments Infrastructure Providers. The three leading payment vendors were identified as:
- Mastercard
- Visa
- Stripe
The Competitor Leaderboard analysed 14 leading providers, and ranked them based on criteria including specific capabilities enabling agentic flows and participation in agentic commerce protocols.
VP of Fintech Market Research Nick Maynard comments: “Agentic commerce is all about early mover advantage, and indeed, the top players have moved quickly to build the rails needed for agentic commerce payments. Early participation in frameworks has been highly beneficial, and as agentic commerce broadens, these frameworks and protocols will be vital for payment provider success.”
A limiting factor to agentic commerce is the highly fragmented payments market, with many different local payment methods. As such, payment service providers face a major challenge in integrating the right methods, but also a major opportunity to capture early market share if they get this mix right.
