Agentic Commerce Remains Vaporware Despite Payment Giant Backing

While Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe have all signaled investments in AI agent shopping—where autonomous systems make purchases on your behalf—none can point to a single live merchant actually using the technology. Google's three named examples stand as the only concrete evidence the category exists beyond marketing. Infrastructure and merchant adoption gaps remain substantial at the scale these platforms imagined. Merchants are waiting for proof of customer demand before integrating another shopping interface, a dynamic that has stalled previous payment-layer innovations.