Separating Hype from Reality in Emerging Payment Trends

Despite near-constant industry buzz, the days when artificial intelligence agents dominate e-commerce—and consumers widely complete in-store purchases with a palm swipe—have not yet arrived.

This is not to say they will never arrive, but if the rollout of prior tech trends like biometric authentication and embedded finance is any indication, there is still substantial runway before this financial future becomes reality.

In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Javelin Strategy & Research’s Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments, and Christopher Miller, Lead Emerging Payments Analyst, cut through the noise surrounding recent payment innovations to assess the true progress of financial trends this year.

What they found is that all these still face challenges. Most notably, an increasingly sophisticated retail landscape only amplifies the questions merchants and financial services firms must answer as they adopt new innovations.

A Road Test for Agentic Commerce

No discussion of trends would be complete without artificial intelligence, and debate about AI’s role in financial services has intensified as models have become increasingly capable. This has led many experts to project the imminent rise of agentic commerce, where AI agents shop and make purchases with limited user direction.

Last year saw a wave of announcements around agentic AI, including new commerce platforms from Visa and Mastercard, as well as a Google-developed agentic protocol intended to serve as a framework for this new shift.

Despite these unveilings, very little true agentic commerce materialized in practice.

“The prediction was that this year we were going to see things live for the first time,”Miller said. “These products—the ideas, the concepts, and the workflows—were all going to get road tested for the first time. My suggestion was that things might not go as smoothly as all the announcements suggested they would, and, frankly, that turned out to be the case.”

These kinds of false starts are not unusual with new technologies, where it takes time to test edge cases and build the underlying infrastructure. In agentic commerce, that infrastructure would need to cover everything from how consumers input an initial prompt to which AI agent is ultimately authorized to complete a purchase.

While many of these components are now being addressed, significant unanswered questions remain about what the finished system will ultimately look like.

“We're getting to questions of who will use this and what will they use it for?” Apgar said. “How will we resolve trust issues? How do we resolve authority issues? How do we know that the action mirrors the intent, and the result mirrors the instruction? From a prediction perspective, as much of the buzz that we've seen about agentic commerce, 2026 is still going to pan out to be a building year.”

Agentic Search Versus Commerce

While agentic commerce may still be a work in progress, AI has already become firmly rooted in the consumer experience this year, especially as a tool for product discovery and comparison.

“One of the things that AI does well is digest large amounts of data efficiently,” Apgar said. “If you are searching for a bookcase that's less than 26 inches tall and less than 38 inches wide, I'm sure you've gone through web searches where you're muddling through product pages and you have to find the details of the specifications and you have to drill down to find the measurements—only to back out and do it again on another web page. And there are how many bookcases?”

AI can rapidly narrow search results, often producing answers and recommendations that consumers would not easily find through conventional search methods.

While these tools are a game changer for consumers, they are also changing merchant business models. Instead of relying on search engine optimization to surface in Google results, merchants are now competing to be visible within AI-generated recommendations.

At the same time, as AI