The missing layer: How trust and payment make agentic retail plausible
Everyone’s been talking about AI agents in retail. Pretty much since the word agent escaped the lab, people have wondered how it might reshape shopping — especially the kind nobody actually enjoys.
But for all the noise, not much has happened. For an agent to act, two simple things have to be true:
The retailer has to trust that the agent is representing a real person — and that it has permission to do so.
There has to be a way for that agent to actually transact.
Until very recently, neither condition was met in any serious way.
That’s what Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) and Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) finally begin to change.
The missing infrastructure
TAP is a trust framework — a way to prove that a digital agent is genuinely acting on behalf of a real person, within limits that person has authorised. It’s the digital version of showing a letter of attorney before doing something in someone else’s name.
Crucially, TAP doesn’t just verify identity once and walk away. It creates an auditable trail of what an authorised agent does — and lets the user revoke that permission at any time.
In practice, that means agents have to design for ongoing consent and transparency: proving not only who they are, but why they’re acting at any given moment.
AP2 handles the other half — the payment flow. It defines how an authorised agent can safely initiate and complete payments, under clear user permission and with full auditability.
Each transaction carries a verifiable record of who initiated it, under what mandate, and with which credentials. Encryption and limits make sure an agent can only act inside boundaries the user set.
TAP answers “Can I trust this agent represents a real user?” AP2 answers “Can that agent actually complete the purchase?”
TAP authenticates the who. AP2 enables the how. Neither is enough alone, but together they finally start filling the gap that’s kept “agentic retail” stuck in slideware.
Why the slideware stayed slideware
For the last couple of years, “agentic retail” has lived mostly in decks and demos. Bright ideas, breathless optimism — not much reality. Doing it properly is expensive, fiddly, and reputationally risky if it misfires in public.
There have been bright spots. The OpenAI × Walmart and OpenAI × Etsy pilots are real experiments — the first genuine attempts to wire agents into commerce, not just marketing chatter.
And at Apadmi, our DomBot prototype for Domino’s back in 2024 proved that chat-driven ordering can actually work when it’s built into the journey, not bolted on. (It also showed how quickly things break when you hand off at the payment stage.)
That’s where everything used to stop: right before the money changed hands. Agents could advise, configure, even build a basket — but when it came to paying, they had to hand control back to the user. Assistive, not delegated.
TAP starts to close the trust gap. AP2 builds the bridge for transactions. The hand‑off isn’t gone yet, but it’s finally crumbling.
Regulation will lag
Regulation will follow, as it always does — and probably in different directions.
In the UK, the FCA, the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 (DUAA), and long-standing GDPR principles all point toward a future of trusted data‑sharing and delegated consent. Across Europe and the rest of the world, the picture is patchier. The law still assumes a human finger on a button; what’s changing is the need to admit that digital proxies exist and act on our behalf.
It’ll take time for frameworks to catch up, and in the meantime, industry standards will quietly do the heavy lifting.
The quiet phase shift
None of this is happening at scale yet — and that’s fine. Every real shift starts with dull work: standards, definitions, protocols. TAP and AP2 are part of that plumbing. They won’t change how people shop or how retailers sell, not yet, but they make delegation plausible.
When agents can finally act safely — trusted, authorised, auditable — it’ll feel like the web or mobile did when they stopped being new and started being assumed.
Agentic retail won’t land with a bang. It’ll seep quietly into everyday life, one delegated transaction at a time.
What happens next is the rough ground: where technology meets people, code meets culture. That’s the messy part. And also the interesting bit, where the most meaningful work (and maybe a little magic) will happen.
Ultimately, exploring and experimenting with agentic now will put you ahead of the pack in the near future. If you're a curious retailer looking to implement this tech in your mobile product strategy, I'd love to chat.
Share