Agentic Commerce Has an Infrastructure Problem — and Merchants Hold More Power Than It Seems

Adyen recently published a whitepaper titled “Agentic Commerce Has an Infrastructure Problem.” The paper makes an important point: while AI agents are rapidly improving at discovering and comparing products, the infrastructure needed for them to reliably execute transactions is still immature.

Most commerce systems simply weren’t built for machine-to-machine interactions.

Today’s ecommerce architecture assumes a human browsing a website, selecting a product, and going through a checkout flow. AI agents behave differently. They query systems programmatically, compare multiple sources at once, and require structured responses. Pricing, inventory, shipping options, and product attributes need to be machine-readable and consistent.

And that’s where the friction starts.

Across the internet, product data is fragmented and often unreliable. Prices change, inventory moves, attributes are inconsistent, and many catalogs were designed for display rather than for machine consumption. Humans can deal with that ambiguity. AI agents cannot.

This is why one point deserves even more emphasis: the highest quality commerce data usually sits with the merchant.

Merchants control the most accurate versions of product catalogs, pricing logic, inventory, promotions, and fulfillment information. If agentic commerce is going to work at scale, AI systems will need direct access to structured merchant data rather than relying on scraped web content.

In that sense, structured product data may become the new storefront.

Rather than replacing merchant experiences entirely, the near-term reality is that AI will primarily assist with discovery and evaluation, while the actual purchase still happens within the merchant’s environment. In this setup, merchants retain control over pricing, inventory, and brand experience, and the payments ecosystem continues to play a critical role. Authorization, fraud prevention, and settlement processes remain essential — perhaps even more so — because transactions may now be initiated by AI agents rather than directly by humans.

Agentic commerce is an exciting idea, but the constraint isn’t AI capability. It’s the infrastructure that allows agents to interact reliably with merchants and payments systems.

The next phase of digital commerce will likely be shaped less by better agents and more by better commerce infrastructure — especially structured data, reliable APIs, and trusted payment rails.