Coinbase, Google and Stripe have all launched protocols for AI agent commerce in 2026, a shift where AI does not just help you decide, it decides and acts on your behalf.
Akshay Chopra, Payments Committee Co-Chair at the MENA Fintech Association and Managing Partner at 237 Ventures, joins Wall Street to MENA to break down what agentic commerce actually means: AI agents booking hotels, negotiating with suppliers and completing purchases within rules you set in advance.
Key points from the conversation:
- Why the business sector, not consumers, may see the fastest adoption, given how naturally procurement rules and supplier logic map to agentic AI
- Why 78% of banks expect fraud to spike as fraud shifts from impersonating a person to manipulating their AI agent
- Why liability gets complicated when a human is removed from the transaction entirely, and who might be on the hook: the user, the AI company, the bank or the card network
- How Visa, Mastercard and Stripe are building the standards to verify which agents are authorised to transact, and at what level
Akshay’s take: card networks have been setting global liability rules since the 1950s, and that same capability will need to extend into a machine-to-machine world.
