Would you give an AI agent your credit card? Companies are betting so
You might already use AI to suggest the most comfortable sneakers under $150, or compare the specs on a new vacuum cleaner before you buy.
From Walmart's Sparky to Amazon's Alexa for Shopping, or even regular chatbots like OpenAI and Gemini, there's plenty of options for a shopping companion that can help with research and recommendations.
Now, retailers are betting you'll let AI agents buy that vacuum or pair of shoes for you — no "proceed to cart" required.
Alexa for Shopping now allows U.S. users to automatically purchase a product when it drops below a certain price.
Investing platform Robinhood last week launched a new feature that lets users have AI agents make decisions to buy or sell stocks on their behalf.
And last month, Google announced a new feature of their payments protocol that will allow AI-driven tools to make purchases for you when certain criteria, like brand and price, are met. The function is coming first to Google's new AI agent available in the U.S., called Gemini Spark, and should arrive in a matter of months.
The aim, the company says, is to set strict guardrails when letting AI buy a product, to make sure its not buying something the human doesn't want.
"On the team, we think … of it like you're giving a teenager their first debit card. There's sort of limits and sort of constraints around it," said Josh Woodward, vice-president of Google Labs, Gemini and AI Studio, during an announcement ahead of the company's I/O conference in May.
Ritesh Kotak, cybersecurity and tech analyst, says the moves we've seen so far are "baby steps," but they're an indication that agentic payments are the next big thing in AI-driven shopping.
"Clearly, there's a full-blown strategy here to completely automate the shopping experience," Kotak said.
But before the tech is commonplace, industry and cybersecurity experts say there are plenty of issues related to privacy, standards and consumer trust that will need to be overcome.
Control and security are big hurdlesWhile product discovery and research has gotten "pretty good," senior product manager at Shopify Victoria Duggan said agentic checkout is lagging behind because it's really complex.
"Anything from split shipping to buy now pay later, installments, validations, even … how will my agent navigate an ID requirement because I'm purchasing an age-verified product. These are all tricky to think about an agent going through," Duggan said at a Shopify event during the Toronto Tech Week conference in May.
Plus, she says, AI agents often get tripped up by CAPTCHAs or other safety mechanisms meant to keep malicious bots away from the payment system.
Shenela Tavarayan, group product manager of merchant solutions at Interac, says the technical kinks can be more easily worked out than consumer consent, as letting AI make buying decisions opens the door for it to make mistakes.
"There has to be a balance between … making your life easier, versus you losing control of what is in your bank account," Tavarayan said.
Less human control also means more likelihood for cybersecurity vulnerabilities, according Kotak.
Protections would need to be put in place to stop AI agents from buying from dubious or unencrypted websites, Kotak says. There is also potential for bad actors to try to manipulate these shopping bots to make purchases that customers don't want.
And trying to get your money back if an AI agent makes a bad purchase — or even just buys a harmless product that wasn't what you wanted — might be tricky.
"When your bot goes out and makes a purchase, everything that comes afterwards may be problematic," Kotak said. "I don't think saying, 'My bot made me do it' is going to be an excuse'."
Kotak says all of these issues will have to be worked out through a set of standards made by cybersecurity professionals, financial institutions and merchants.
That preparation work is seemingly underway. Visa, for example, is working with banks and other financial institutions through a program called Agentic Ready — which was expanded to Canada last month — to test agentic payments before they're in broad use.
Do shoppers want it, anyway?Even if those challenges get ironed out, experts say it will take time to get consumers to trust AI agents.
Research from consulting firm Bain & Company, conducted in September 2025, suggested that about half of American respondents weren't comfortable with AI completing transactions for them.
While it wasn't being used to make autonomous purchases, OpenAI rolled back its instant checkout feature within ChatGPT in March.
OpenAI said it was handing the payment process back to merchants because the feature didn't offer enough "flexibility," but consumers reportedly weren't adopting the pay-in-chat function, even though they were using the chatbot for shopping research.
During a panel at Toronto Tech Week, Martin Ho, vice-president of retail payments at Scotiabank, said some research suggests consumers are OK with allowing AI to make payments on their behalf — but only within certain categories and with small sticker prices.
"If you buy $10 paper towels versus a $10,000 vacation, it's a very different level of consideration and involvement that the human would be expecting to do," Ho said. "There is an evolution in terms of how comfortable humans are going to be [with] empowering that agent."
'Shopping is about fun'Jeremy Goldman, e-commerce analyst and vice-president of editorial and insights for industry publication Rethink Retail, says categories that consumers will likely be OK with outsourcing to AI are low-cost and replenishable things, such as toilet paper or toothpaste.
He's not sure we will see wide adoption of agentic shopping across all product categories for that reason.
"I think that there are a lot of prognosticators who think that we're a lot closer than we are," Goldman said.
While companies might see shopping as drudgery that can be automated away, he thinks customers won't be so willing to give up their weekend trip to the mall or online browsing session when they're hunting for a new pair of shoes.
"People are forgetting that shopping is about fun, and a lot of people actually do it for fun," Goldman said. "[What you buy] says something about you, and it no longer says something about you if you're outsourcing that."
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