Although artificial intelligence presents much to be excited about, a substantial technical burden remains in building out the ecosystem necessary for the vision of its biggest cheerleaders. Many companies have made agentic commerce a high priority, but the amount of work left to do is substantial, and fitting this into the modern economy is highly complex.
That’s why Christopher Miller, Lead Analyst in Emerging Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, advises caution on agentic commerce. In a new report, 2025 Emerging Payments Survey: Agents Enter the Stage, Miller warns that the technology will not be scaling, even within the next year or two. He also thinks that by the time AI reaches maturity, ChatGPT is not likely to remain its standard-bearer.
Be Wary of New Adopters
Many people have fallen for the hype of AI, and Miller has encountered many who think that agentic commerce is already happening at scale.
“That’s not true,” he said. “What is true is that there is consumer interest in using chat-like tools to consider purchases. There is some evidence that they would be willing to complete the purchases through their agents, although that’s much less clear because the raw numbers are very, very small.”
Looking strictly at survey numbers presents problems because current users of agentic commerce are unlikely to be representative of the general population. If a survey of 3,000 people finds that 100 have performed a certain act, those 100 people are, by definition, early adopters and unlikely to represent the behaviors and the trajectories of the rest of the population.
No matter how small the number of agentic commerce users is now, people are showing that they are willing to consider trying it. Even among those who have not used such a tool, 40% f say they might be willing to trust it. That is an early sign that more consumer adoption is coming.
There is also substantial evidence beyond the Javelin survey that consumers are trying agentic commerce tools. There is no doubt that people are downloading and trying these tools. The number of people using them every day and have made them their actual virtual assistant appears small, but many people are using AI sporadically, a couple of times a week or a couple of times a month.
“That’s evidence that they are willing,” Miller said. “Will they use it over time? Will they fully change their behavior? We don’t know. But our data suggests that 40% of those people would be willing to expand their usage. Sometimes when you run surveys like these, you see a substantial portion with a categorical unwillingness to use the technology for some reason, whether it’s lack of comfort or distrust of the companies providing it or whatever. If we have at this point a high degree of willingness even among those who have not yet used, I think that suggests that there’s room to grow.”
A Maturing Industry
There are also many questions about what a more mature AI experience would look like. For most people today, their default interaction with the Internet is to type into a box and get back some sites or suggestions. If their first instinct becomes to look for something in ChatGPT instead of Google, it is a different experience in terms of accessing information about shopping decisions.
“If you never decide that ChatGPT is your first stop to get information, and you continue to go through Google, then this opportunity doesn’t grow to be as big as people think it is,“ Miller said. “That is what’s really up for debate, whether people will, broadly speaking, make that shift. Will it remain a niche? Will it remain something that they do side by side, a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B? We’re looking for insight into that kind of question.
“How quickly that transformation takes place is what tells a merchant, or a payment processor, or a card issuer that this thing is really happening and we have to prioritize getting in on this now. If we cannot participate in that ecosystem, then we will lose the payment activities of those customers.”
Moving Beyond ChatGPT
Even though ChatGPT is the best-known and most-used AI interface right now, Miller thinks that could end as the industry matures. In the early days of the Internet, services like AOL and CompuServe bundled web access with a user interface. Consumers bought the Internet access component from their cable company.
Today, we have a chat interface provided by ChatGPT that may seem to have cracked the code of AI, but that is unlikely to end up being the unique value proposition of this set of technologies. That is not the history of any other kind of transformative technology. This technology enables more than just the ability to type in a line of chat and get back text that tells you answers. Miller thinks the future of agentic commerce could be features that are embedded in other tools.
“It’s possible that some people will want a single access point across all things, but there are so many reasons and so many factors mitigating against that,” he said. “People might say that what they want is a single place to do all of their shopping, but when it comes down to it, maybe they actually prefer a few very particular shops. They might actually trust the insight or suggestion or advice provided by those companies as opposed to from some single big company.
“The delivery of things like these artificial intelligence tools could come from a few stores, maybe Amazon and Walmart and Target. It is unlikely that some single tool will actually know everything about you, will be able to handle all of the types of choices that you would have, and would actually be good at it. To the extent that you are the type of person who will purchase from a single brand, you’re probably not going to go for the generic search result, and you’re not going to use a tool that just tells you whatever the random best one is. You want to know where is the Delta flight, or some other branded thing. That’s the direction something like this is likely to go.”
‘You Will Lose Out’
Some people will try anything new all the time, but for others, new technology has to solve a lot of problems before they’ll even think about learning it. The first pass through AI has not solved a lot of problems. Furthermore, the problems AI has solved might not be of interest to a wide group of people.
But Miller does see that consumer behavior is shifting toward a willingness to use and or trust agents as payment entities.
“That constitutes a capability challenge that you have to meet,” he said. “If you are not changing your technical and business capabilities to recognize that reality, you’re not going to die this year, but you will lose out.”
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