There has been considerable fanfare surrounding the emergence of agentic commerce, followed by a race to build the supporting infrastructure. While there has been less hoopla accompanying biometric authentication and digital identification cards, there are lessons from the evolution of these technologies that can be applied to agentic commerce initiatives.
As Christopher Miller, Lead Emerging Payments Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, notes in the 2026 Emerging Payments Trends report, one main commonality is that none of these technologies are close to achieving ubiquity. That said, this year will bring more frequent and tangible interactions with each of them for consumers, merchants, and financial institutions alike.
Face Pay for BBQ
The benefits of biometric authentication in payments are well established, including greater transaction security and reduced friction at checkout. As consumers have grown accustomed to fingerprint and facial recognition through everyday smartphone use, many have speculated that the widespread adoption of biometrics in retail payments is imminent.
While the underlying tech has existed for years and there have been notable implementations—most prominently Amazon’s pay-by-palm rollout in its physical stores—there is still a ways to go.
“In November, I published the first scorecard about biometric authentication providers at the point of sale, and the fundamental finding was that there was very little in this space that was actually in market,” Miller said. “But a number of these products planned to be available and suggested that they in fact had clients who would be launching in the U.S. in 2026.”
To date, adoption has largely been limited to pilots and trial runs within defined use cases. These range from iris-scanning programs tied to exclusive Visa cards to facial recognition systems used for venue entry and concessions at the New England Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.
This year, more of these pilots and trials are expected to move beyond experimentation and into broader, real-world deployment.
“Some people will get a chance to see it for real, and not just as a pilot somewhere in one place,” Miller said. “Last year I went to San Francisco, and I did a face pay in a pilot. But realistically, that’s one BBQ shop in one arena in one city in the United States. The point is that people will start to see this in the wild and not just in very controlled environments.”
“It’s not going to be commonplace, it’s not going to take over the world, but there will be people who do this, and that’s a step forward,” he said.
The Chicken and the Egg
As with biometrics, digital ID cards offer clear security advantages and can reduce friction in use cases such as airport queues or purchases that require age verification.
However, much like biometrics, the road to digital ID adoption has been rocky.
“The rollout of digital ID has been a classic case of uneven awareness and uneven availability,” Miller said. “Some states have had this for almost 10 years, and then other states still can’t get out of their own way. We’re reaching the point where it’s going to be more than half of states that offer it.”
“You had a chicken and the egg problem,” he said. “Why should merchants go to the trouble of building the infrastructure to accept digital IDs if nobody had digital IDs? Well, why should I get a digital ID if nobody’s going to accept it? It’s a classic problem, but the availability problem is mostly over. We can say with reasonable confidence that within a decade or so, every state is going to issue something.”
As adoption increases, merchants and financial institutions will gain greater confidence to invest further in acceptance technologies, both online and at physical points of sale.
As this infrastructure matures, innovators are likely to identify additional use cases for digital IDs. For example, financial institutions could integrate digital ID acceptance directly into customer onboarding flows. This approach could prove superior to the current paradigm, in which users take pictures of their identification documents and submit them for manual review.
“There will be mainstream visibility to this,” Miller said. “We’ll then start to see who is interested in adopting it. It’s still going to be a self-selected group of people. It’s not like we’re immediately going to go zero to 60 on digital IDs. This is where there’s more likely to be pushback—interestingly enough—than biometrics.”
“One of the reasons is that like almost all of the biometric implementations, it’s optional,” he said. “If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it. The TSA does facial recognition, but if you don’t want to do it then that’s fine, we’ll do it this other way. It’s the same with Digital IDs, it’s going to grow; it’s going to be more visible.”
The First Encounter
Many of the challenges facing biometric authentication and digital ID adoption also apply to agentic commerce, where AI agents perform the lion’s share of a consumer’s shopping. While delegating purchases to AI agents offers clear benefits, many consumers may be reluctant to give them full autonomy over transactions.
What’s more, as with biometrics and digital IDs, users must first become aware of agentic commerce programs and then opt in. Early deployments will likely consist of pilots and trial runs in narrowly defined use cases, the results of which should be interpreted cautiously.
“Pilot participants are not always representative and in fact are probably anti-representative of consumers as a whole,” Miller said. “If you participated in a pilot, you’re already willing to try new things. That means that your feelings about it, your reactions to it, if you would use it again, all of those things—they’re just different than many other people’s.”
All of these factors—coupled with growing skepticism around AI’s accuracy—point to a more methodical rollout of agentic commerce than some reporting has suggested.
“Almost nothing was even remotely in production in 2025, which is an important call-out because people talked like it was happening and there were these huge growth waves,” Miller said. “No, false. That sets up 2026 to be the first encounter that many people across the entirety of agentic tech will have with the products, ranging from the consumers using them to the merchants accepting them to the payment processes interacting with them.”
“That is the trend of the year, which will be underwhelming for many people because this is where the kinks are being worked out and where the problems will in fact be surfaced,” he said. “That is a natural part of the development of emerging tools, but this is happening under a pretty bright glare.”
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