March 2026 | Analysis & Commentary
Something fundamental is shifting in how commerce works, and most businesses in Pakistan have not noticed yet. The customer , the one who browses, compares, decides and pays ; is being replaced. Not by another human. By an AI agent acting on someone’s behalf.
Agentic commerce is the next stage of digital trade. It’s not about chatbots answering questions or recommendation engines nudging clicks. It’s about autonomous AI systems that receive a goal, find the best product or service, negotiate terms, complete the transaction and reconcile the payment , all without the human doing anything beyond setting the objective at the start. OpenAI and Stripe have already launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Mastercard built Agent Pay. Visa released its Trusted Agent Protocol. This infrastructure is live. The question for Pakistan is whether its businesses are positioned to sell into it.
How AI Agents Are Transforming B2B Procurement and eCommerce
Picture this. A procurement manager at a mid-sized manufacturing firm in Karachi sets a goal inside their enterprise software: source 500 units of a specific industrial component, delivery within 10 days, under a set price ceiling, from a verified supplier. The AI agent takes it from there. It searches supplier directories, checks inventory availability in real time, compares pricing across vendors, reviews compliance certifications, shortlists three options and presents a ranked recommendation. The human spent four minutes setting the rules. The AI spent four seconds executing a task that previously took two days.
Once approved, the same agent raises the purchase order, triggers the payment via a virtual card token and logs the transaction against the chart of accounts. This is not a future scenario. Versions of this workflow are running today at companies using Mastercard’s Agent Pay, Visa’s TAP infrastructure and platforms built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) , the open standard that lets AI agents connect to any external service, often described as the USB-C of AI integrations. The architecture exists. What varies is how far each business and each economy has gone in building for it.
The Three Pillars of Agentic Commerce
To understand where agentic commerce is going, you need to understand what it is built on.
Agentic Identity: Trust Becomes the Product
Before an AI agent can transact on your behalf, it needs to prove it’s authorized to do so. Mastercard’s Agentic Tokens and Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol solve this by issuing dynamic cryptographic credentials tied to a specific user and a specific spending scope. A merchant receiving payment from an AI agent can verify in real time that the agent is legitimate, what it’s authorized to buy and how much it can spend.
In March 2026, Mastercard took this further by launching Verifiable Intent in collaboration with Google. It’s a new open, standards-based trust layer aligned with Google’s Agent Payments Protocol and Universal Commerce Protocol. Verifiable Intent creates a tamper-resistant record of what a user authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf. It uses Selective Disclosure, a privacy control technique that ensures only the minimum necessary information about a transaction is shared across parties and only when needed. Without this layer, agentic commerce cannot scale securely.
Scoped Payment Tokens: The Invisible Buyer Has Limits
AI agents don’t use raw card credentials. They use constrained tokens that define exactly what can be purchased, from which merchant category, up to what amount and within what time window. This is the native compliance layer that makes agentic commerce trustworthy for both buyers and sellers. It also means the fraud surface is structurally smaller than traditional card transactions, i.e the invisible buyer operates within guardrails no human checkout enforces automatically.
Programmable Settlement: Why Stablecoins Matter
Traditional bank rails have cutoff times, correspondent banking delays and minimum transaction economics that make micropayments and cross-border SME trade inefficient. Stablecoins are digital tokens pegged to fiat currencies that settle instantly, across borders, at any hour, in fractions of a cent. Galaxy Digital’s CEO stated in 2025 that AI will become the biggest user of stablecoins, and Coinbase moved immediately, giving AI agents actual wallets to make payments directly. Programmable settlement removes the constraints that made machine-speed commerce impossible on legacy rails.
The Latest Shift: OpenAI Moves Checkout Into Merchant Apps
As of March 2026, the agentic commerce landscape is already evolving from where it started. OpenAI’s Instant Checkout feature, which processed purchases directly from product listings inside ChatGPT, is being sidelined in favour of checkout experiences through dedicated merchant apps. Target became one of the first major retailers to launch its own ChatGPT app. The Agentic Commerce Protocol co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe lives on, but it now powers transactions through these merchant app environments rather than raw in-chat product listings.
“We’re evolving how we approach commerce in ChatGPT to better meet merchants and users where they are. Instant Checkout is moving to Apps, where purchases can happen more seamlessly.”
— OpenAI spokesperson, March 2026
The infrastructure is real but it’s still finding its form. For Pakistani businesses, the practical implication is straightforward: being present inside merchant app ecosystems, not just having a website, is increasingly where agentic buyers will be directed.
How to Optimize Your eCommerce Business for AI Agents
If your business sells digitally ; software, physical goods, services, information — agentic commerce changes your customer. The entity evaluating your product will increasingly be a machine, not a person. It won’t respond to emotional marketing copy or be swayed by a flashy homepage. It’ll query your product data, check your pricing against competitors, verify your delivery terms and make a decision based on structured information. If your product listings are vague, inconsistent or not machine-readable, AI agents will skip you. You won’t even know you lost the sale, because you were never visible to the machine.
Four things determine whether an AI agent includes or excludes your business:
- Structured product data: If your catalogue is a PDF or a vague HTML page, AI agents cannot parse it. Businesses that invest in clean, standardized product APIs and data feeds will be visible to agentic buyers. Businesses that don’t will be invisible and they won’t know why their sales are declining.
- Pricing transparency: Agents optimize for price, delivery and compliance simultaneously. Hidden fees, opaque shipping costs and unclear return policies that a human might overlook are immediate disqualifiers for an AI buyer. Businesses with transparent, structured pricing win more agentic transactions.
- Machine-verifiable trust signals: Customer reviews still matter, but they need to be accessible in forms that agents can parse. Verified certifications, structured compliance documentation, and API-accessible ratings will increasingly determine whether an agent shortlists or skips your business.
- Agent-compatible payment infrastructure: If your checkout flow requires CAPTCHA completions, manual OTPs or any human interaction step, agentic buyers cannot complete a purchase with you. This is where the Mastercard Agent Pay and PayPal integration becomes directly relevant: in October 2025, Mastercard announced Agent Pay will integrate directly into PayPal’s wallet. Merchants who already offer PayPal checkout can participate in agentic commerce without complex technical requirements. No new code, no major overhaul.
Pakistan’s Position in Agentic Commerce
Pakistan’s IT export sector generates over $3 billion annually, a figure that grew 20 percent year-on-year in the first half of FY26 according to P@SHA. Its freelance economy is one of the largest in the world by volume. Its textile and manufacturing exporters serve global supply chains. All of these sectors are directly in the path of agentic commerce, and right now very few of them are building for it.
Pakistani software firms selling SaaS products globally need to ensure their platforms integrate with agentic commerce protocols so enterprise buyers using AI procurement agents can find, evaluate and purchase their products without friction. Pakistani freelance platforms and talent marketplaces need structured APIs that allow AI agents to source, vet and commission talent programmatically. Pakistani exporters need to present their product catalogues in machine-readable formats with real-time inventory, pricing and logistics data that agentic procurement systems can query directly.
The remittance angle is equally important. Pakistan receives roughly $30 billion in remittances annually at fees of 2% to 5%. As agentic payment infrastructure matures and stablecoin rails become the default for cross-border settlement, those fees compress dramatically. The State Bank needs a clear framework for how these flows are received and converted before informal or foreign-domiciled channels absorb the volume. P@SHA Chairman Sajjad Syed has described AI adoption as a matter of “global survival and economic sovereignty” for Pakistan’s tech sector. He’s not wrong.
From the $1 Billion Commitment to Actual Infrastructure
Indus AI Week in February 2026 was the right political moment. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced a $1 billion national AI commitment by 2030, with plans to introduce AI curriculum across all federally controlled schools including AJK, Gilgit-Baltistan and remote parts of Balochistan. One thousand fully funded PhD scholarships in AI were announced alongside a nationwide program to train one million non-IT professionals in AI skills. The Islamabad AI Declaration laid out eight pillars for sovereign AI. The engagement from P@SHA was strong. These signals matter.
But the gap between declaration and infrastructure is where opportunities are lost. Three things need to happen specifically for Pakistan to capture value from agentic commerce:
- SECP and SBP need a joint framework for agent-initiated transactions: Right now there is no clear regulatory answer to the question of who is liable when an AI agent makes a purchase on behalf of a Pakistani business or consumer. That ambiguity is a blocker for enterprise adoption. The framework doesn’t need to be exhaustive. It just needs to be clear enough that businesses can build on it.
- Pakistani payment processors need to support agentic commerce protocols: Mastercard Agent Pay and Visa TAP are already live globally, and the PayPal integration means millions of merchants are closer to agent-readiness than they realize. Pakistani acquiring banks and payment gateways need to integrate these standards so local merchants can accept agent-initiated transactions. Without this, Pakistani businesses are excluded from the agentic buyer pool by default.
- Export-facing businesses need to audit their digital infrastructure for agent readiness: This is something every Pakistani IT firm, exporter and digital marketplace can do today, without waiting for regulation. Structured product data, transparent pricing APIs, machine-verifiable compliance documentation and agent-compatible checkout flows aren’t complex investments. They’re the baseline for participating in agentic commerce.
The buyer is changing. The question is not whether Pakistani businesses will eventually adapt to agentic commerce. The question is whether they adapt early enough to compete for agentic buyers — or late enough to only compete for the ones everyone else has already passed on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Agentic Commerce?
Agentic commerce refers to commercial transactions executed autonomously by AI agents on behalf of human users. The agent receives a goal, identifies the best product or service, negotiates terms, completes the transaction and reconciles payment — without requiring human involvement beyond the initial instruction.
How do AI agents make secure payments?
AI agents use scoped payment tokens rather than raw card numbers. These are constrained credentials that define the merchant category, maximum spend and validity window for each transaction. Identity is verified through systems like Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent and Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, which provide cryptographic proof that an agent is authorized to act on a specific user’s behalf.
What is Pakistan’s $1 Billion AI Strategy?
Announced at Indus AI Week in February 2026, Pakistan’s $1 billion AI commitment targets investment by 2030 across education, research and industry. It includes AI curriculum in all federally controlled schools, 1,000 PhD scholarships in AI and a program to train one million non-IT professionals in AI skills.
What is Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent standard?
Launched in March 2026 in collaboration with Google, Verifiable Intent is an open, standards-based trust layer for agentic commerce. It creates a tamper-resistant record of what a user authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf, using Selective Disclosure to share only the minimum necessary transaction information across parties.
Sources
Mastercard Verifiable Intent (Mar 2026), Mastercard Agent Pay (Apr & Oct 2025), Mastercard × PayPal Partnership (Oct 2025), Visa Trusted Agent Protocol (2025), OpenAI × Stripe Agentic Commerce Protocol (2025), Digital Commerce 360 — OpenAI Commerce Pivot (Mar 2026), Google Universal Commerce Protocol (Jan 2026), Galaxy Digital / Novogratz on Stablecoins (Sep 2025), KPMG Pulse of Fintech H1 2025, Accenture Sibos 2025, P@SHA IT Export Data FY26, Globe Newswire / Pakistan Indus AI Week (Feb 2026), DAWN (Feb 2026), Arab News — Pakistan AI Commitment (Feb 2026), indusai.gov.pk
About Author:
Abdullah Mansaf, a BS.FinTech student at FAST-NUCES and AVP of the NUCES Fintech Society. I am enthusiastic about merging finance and technology to build AI-driven models, apps and tools that provide innovative solutions for the modern economy, and I am deeply passionate about learning new fintech, finance and AI trends.”
