Shawn Conahan is chief revenue officer of Wildfire Systems, a white-label cashback and shopping rewards loyalty platform.

The landscape of digital commerce is on the brink of a monumental shift, driven by the rapid emergence of agentic commerce. In this new era, AI-powered agents will autonomously find, compare and purchase products and services for consumers — moving far beyond basic product recommendations.

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Agentic commerce upends the foundations of digital shopping and payments. By automating search, comparison and checkout, AI agents strip out the touchpoints that merchants, advertisers and payment providers have relied on for decades. The result is a new competitive landscape where loyalty, rewards and seamless integration into agent decision-making determine who captures value — and who gets left behind.

For financial institutions (FIs) and players in the payments industry, understanding and leveraging emerging monetization strategies will be crucial to avoid being disintermediated from the transaction entirely and to transform from passive observers into active enablers of the agentic economy.

The disappearing checkout and shifting value chain

Agentic shopping represents an “inversion” of the traditional online model. In the classic approach, humans search, narrow down their choices, and eventually make a purchase on a merchant’s site. A shopping agent flips that flow: given a clear goal (say, “blue Nikes, size 10, under $100”), it instantly scans multiple merchants, finds the exact match, and completes the purchase — going straight to the bottom of the funnel.

This bypasses the familiar online shopping journey. The cart, the checkout page, identity verification, even CAPTCHAs — all of it is handled programmatically by the agent, often invisibly to the user. This frictionless experience is a major game changer for us human shoppers.

The implications are massive. If consumers rely on AI agents to make purchases, they are no longer starting with search engines or visiting merchant websites to browse. That shift radically changes where marketing dollars flow. Agents don’t have eyeballs or emotions — so they can’t be swayed by display ads, brand storytelling or search rankings.

This means the entire ecommerce value chain, historically built on attracting human eyeballs to websites, is shifting dramatically.

Pressure on traditional payments models

The payments industry faces major implications. Without a traditional checkout moment, the payment experience is effectively hidden from the consumer when using a shopping agent. That creates real potential for disintermediation of payment networks.

Agents could theoretically find the most optimal payment rails in real time, leveraging payment tokens, stablecoins, direct bank transfers via real-time payment systems (RTP), or even crypto, potentially bypassing traditional card networks altogether. Amias Gerety of QED Investors even suggested that the traditional four- or five-party payments model could expand to an 11-party model, introducing AI agents at the consumer, acquirer and merchant levels.

A key concern for payment providers is making sure their cards stay the preferred option when an agent automatically decides which tender to use.

Emerging monetization strategies

As shopping agents become trusted intermediaries, traditional revenue models are under pressure, paving the way for new monetization mechanisms:

Affiliate Commissions and Performance Marketing: Since shopping agents don't interact with display ads or clickable banners, marketing budgets are expected to shift dramatically towards performance-based models, in which a merchant pays a commission to the referring party for completed sales. Even Sam Altman of OpenAI has openly speculated about charging a "2% affiliate fee or something" for consumer purchases made through OpenAI. This approach — where payment occurs only when a purchase is made — is, in my view, the purest expression of marketing spend in an algorithmic world.
Agent-Ranking Fees: Another potential revenue stream involves fees paid by merchants or brands to rank favorably in agent recommendations. This shifts the focus from traditional advertising placements to ensuring product data and offers are discoverable and appealing to the agents themselves.
Loyalty-Powered Revenue Streams: Monetization for FIs will heavily rely on their high-value loyalty programs; in fact, loyalty becomes exponentially more important in an environment where agents make payment choices. This involves agents prioritizing choices based on a user’s preferences, often by maximizing savings through cashback or by earning the most rewards for a given payment method. For instance, a shopping agent booking travel might favor a specific airline if it allows the customer to accrue the most miles or points.

Financial institutions’ opportunity

Financial institutions are grappling with how to retain customer loyalty as the value chain evolves. In an agentic world, loyalty programs tied to cards and networks — rather than individual merchants — become powerful differentiators. To stay top-of-wallet, providers must integrate loyalty offers, cashback, and discounts directly into the agent’s decision-making process to secure tender primacy.

Three strategies to help FIs adapt to the agentic AI era include:

Staying informed and experimenting early, learning how their solutions can add value in an agent-driven world.
Preparing integration paths for agentic commerce by investing in API endpoints or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that allow agents to apply rewards and loyalty offerings. MCP is a foundational standard enabling AI assistants to access data from complex systems, and its adoption by major players like OpenAI, Google, and Visa underscores its importance.
Focusing on rewards and value as an integral part of their agent-facing technologies and not just enabling functionality.

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The market path for agentic commerce may ultimately hinge on who owns the customer relationship and can best balance convenience, trust, and value. For financial institutions, the key is to move from observers to enablers of the agentic economy. That means leveraging their loyalty ecosystems and proactively integrating rewards into agent decision-making. In the agentic era, value will ultimately win and FIs that strategically anchor their offerings in loyalty will gain a powerful competitive edge.