Consumer AI agents: The next Payments battle

Meta's Muse has ushered in a new era (and race) for consumer AI agents, and agents of commerce are finally here in a still clunky but fast-evolving way, with payments catching up. Muse is already used for shopping (Meta says it is quickly becoming one of its biggest usage drivers), tracking flight and hotel prices, booking appointments and clearing out inboxes. Instinct, an invite-only text-based agent that just raised $1B at a $10B valuation, says it is approaching $1B in annualized transaction volume, about half of it travel. Trust remains a big bottleneck: only 23% of U.S. consumers say they trust GenAI to handle payments for them. The report addresses who will control payments, liability and disputes in the agentic world, and the role of networks and PSPs. Agentic commerce is currently minuscule as a % of e-commerce but fast evolving. Both networks have launched agentic tokens (Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay) with enhanced data, context and assurance, and 100% of a