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Machines of Buying and Selling Grace - Adam Behrens, New Generation
Takeaway
Agentic commerce needs intent-level rails — unified product APIs, delegated payment auth, and dynamic merchant interfaces — not just bots clicking buy buttons on legacy sites.
Summary
- Defines a store as a location/protocol facilitating merchant-buyer transactions; AI digitizes the participants and interactions — merchant agents, consumer agents, intent-level infrastructure.
- Two future paths: agents browse merchant websites (operator-style, often errors today) or hit programmatic MCP/API endpoints returning dynamic UI elements directly into a chat interface.
- Solutions emerging: Visa's delegated authentication (use real card) over Stripe's virtual-card model; product-data 'Plaid' aggregator instead of scraping or per-merchant feed integration.
- AI-channel users at partner merchants show higher conversion, AOV and LTV — changing the cost-of-fulfillment math for agent-mediated commerce.
agentscommercepayments
Original description
How to go beyond browser automation to truly agentic commerce, where AI can buy, sell and negotiate on behalf of users and merchants. About Adam Behrens Adam Behrens is the co-founder and CEO of New Gen, a company that partners with global brands and merchants to unlock AI native commerce opportunities. New Gen builds infrastructure for brands to host their own conversational AI experiences and to connect their data into 3rd party chat clients like ChatGPT and Claude. Adam previously worked on trading infrastructure at Bridgewater and Banking-as-a-Service at Stripe. Outside of training AI models he is busy training his 8 month old Vizsla puppy. Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter