“Buy the best small-footprint food blender for $200 or less.”

“Rebook my flight with a change fee of under $150.”

Prompts like these are becoming possible for consumers as they direct AI assistants not just to search but also to make purchases on their behalf.

A significant development came in 2024, when Perplexity integrated shopping features into its search results, enabling one-click purchases. By early 2025, Visa and Mastercard had joined the fray with the likes of OpenAI and Skyfire to accelerate the shift to AI-enabled and agentic payments. Equipped with integrated payment options, security, and spending limits, AI assistants will soon be able to autonomously handle product search, discovery, and purchasing decisions based on consumers’ instructions.

This wave of agentic AI commerce has the potential to redefine who controls payments, with major implications for financial services firms. How this world will unfold—including considerations like the mix of payment rails (that is, the role of digital wallets and stablecoins vs. cards) and the protocols for fraud and security—remains unclear. But if technology giants such as Google and Apple become the default consumer interfaces for agentic commerce, issuers and banks will face significant pressures on the related profit pools, as has already occurred with the rise of Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

Yet success in agentic commerce won’t come down to technology alone. It will also hinge on trust and security. Today, many consumers may be comfortable with AI as a recommendation engine, but they are more cautious about transacting through AI. Which aspects are they ready to embrace, and which will take further convincing?

To explore these questions, Bain & Company partnered with ROI Rocket to survey more than 2,000 US consumers about their views on AI in payments.

What we learned:                                                                    

• AI familiarity is high. 72% of consumers said they’ve used AI tools.
• But few use it to make purchases. Just 10% said they have bought something using AI (in any form, such as via Perplexity Pro’s one-click feature)—mostly for small-ticket grocery items and household goods.
• Trust is the sticking point. Only 24% feel comfortable using AI to complete purchases today. Security and privacy top the list of concerns (see Figure 1).
• Brand matters. Consumers trust familiar names in payments and retail—think Apple Pay, PayPal, and Amazon—more than banks, credit card companies, or technology platforms (see Figure 2). High-trust consumer brands could have an advantage as consumers increasingly accept AI-mediated purchasing, while banks and card providers will need to build greater trust.

Still, opportunities abound. Many consumers are on the fence, not opposed. In fact:

• 64% said they have used or are open to using AI to complete a purchase. 

• 73% have used or would consider using AI to help research products or compare prices.

As AI spreads and consumers warm up to purchasing with it, payment-related uses will likely follow. Rather than cede ground and profit pools to technology giants, financial institutions have an opportunity to leverage their experience handling consumers’ financial information under strict regulatory regimes to build a robust and secure agentic commerce payment ecosystem. Companies competing in this burgeoning market will want to address questions specific to their role.

• Banks: Who will own the customer relationship—the bank or the provider of the agent purchasing on the customer’s behalf? How will a bank prevent fraud and manage risk in the new context of AI agent buyers?
• Payment service providers: Is the provider ready to accept payments from an intelligent agent? How will it know the agent is legitimate?
• Independent software vendors: What role will there be for agents? How can a vendor augment its offering? Does the vendor possess enough proprietary data to train its own model?
• Payment infrastructure providers: What is the appropriate business model for intelligent agent infrastructure? What will the provider monetize? And how will it orchestrate collaboration and engender trust to ensure agentic transactions occur consistently and safely?

In addition, for any company aiming to capture the coming opportunities, here’s where to start:

• Be transparent. Make it easy to understand how AI is used, and give consumers clear opt-in/opt-out tools.
• Focus on what matters. Consumers want convenience and savings (see Figure 3). Seamlessly integrating faster checkout, automatically applied promotions, and timely offers can serve to accelerate adoption.
• Start small. Begin with low-cost, low-risk purchases to help consumers build comfort with agentic AI.
• Offer control. Let more hesitant users have control over an explicit payment authorization step in their AI interactions.
• Decide on your role in the emerging ecosystem. Determine whether to build a proprietary agentic AI customer experience or only to be discoverable by external agents in the emerging AI ecosystem. If both, define which proprietary data and assets will remain closed to the broader ecosystem.

Agentic AI will soon play a central role in how people shop and pay, shifting purchase behavior and potentially shifting payment profit pools. To compete in that future, financial institutions must lead with trust. That means designing experiences that are transparent, convenient, and under the consumer’s control.