The news that ChatGPT is embedding payments into its flow truly heralds the arrival of agentic commerce – a big step forward for both AI and ecommerce and one that could well bring about substantial changes to how mVAS works.
To backtrack a bit, agentic commerce refers to the use of autonomous AI agents to carry out the entire purchasing process — searching, comparing, deciding and making payments — on behalf of a consumer according to their predefined preferences and constraints. These AI agents operate proactively, not only following instructions, but also making decisions and executing transactions without requiring the user to manually intervene at each step.
ChatGPT is just the latest in a long line of payment companies and other interested parties to get on board with this. Visa (“Intelligent Commerce”) and Mastercard (“Agent Pay”) have launched programmes where AI agents can securely transact using tokenized credentials on behalf of users.Amazon, for example, is rolling out “Buy for Me” features, while Microsoft is also integrating payment and shopping capabilities into conversational agents. Companies like Checkout.com are collaborating with Visa and Mastercard to enable account-to-account and tokenized payments within agentic commerce flows. And even Adobe is in on the act, developing orchestrator platforms to manage fleets of AI agents in commerce. The shake up has begun.
What is the impact on telemedia?
Of course, radically changing how – or rather who – is using ecommerce has huge implications for the telemedia sector. While most peiopel think of ecommerce as being about biuying goods to be delivered in a cardboard box (via drone if you are a true believer!), the business of buying digital goods and content is going to feel all the same pressures and changes from agentic commerce as the ‘real world goods’ side.
For example, in mobile entertainment generally, 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. In fact, totally changing discovery and conversion… this would bring about a wholesale change in how mVAS services drive traffic as it would be looking for agentic AI to find services not puny 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 canceling when needed. All this sort of circumvents perhaops 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.
Changes to payments
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 trailsand fraud prevention to ensure agents do not make unauthorized mobile payments.
Such agentic commerce is also expected to accelerate the use and innovation of alternative payment methods – not least tokenized 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.
Broader implications
There are a raft of broader implications to all this outside of just how things will evolve for payments and how people shop for mVAS. Traditional consumer journeys — manual browsing and checkout —will diminish in favour of API-driven, agent-mediated purchasing, disrupting the front-end focus of mobile content and payments.
Marketing and conversion strategies must shift: brands will need to appeal to AI agents through structured data, relevance, and clear value propositions surfaced in algorithmic selection processes.
Regulatory and privacy considerations will intensify; agents will handle highly sensitive data and purchasing decisions, demanding new standards for user authorization, fraud, and dispute resolution.
Taken together this all spells a potential big change up ahead for how consumers find, use and pay for content and services – changes that will be felt across the telemedia value chain.
And with ChatGPT the late in a growing list of players that are building agentic commerce into their business model, this change is going to happen very soon indeed. Are you going to be ready?
