Back to Insights
AI & Technology January 9, 2026 11 min

Marketing to Machines: The Rise of Agentic Commerce

Priyesh Dhaduk

Priyesh Dhaduk

Head of Technology

Marketing to Machines: The Rise of Agentic Commerce

If 2024 was the era of Chatbots, 2026 is the era of Agents. We are witnessing the rise of Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Commerce, where autonomous software buys products on behalf of humans.

The Shift: "Hey Agent, Restock My Pantry"

Consumers are delegating tasks to personal AI agents—"Book a flight to London under $800," "Restock my pantry with keto-friendly snacks," or "Find a birthday gift for my wife." To service these requests, your brand's AI agent must negotiate with the consumer's AI agent.

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

Co-developed by tech giants, the UCP acts as the HTTP of agentic commerce. It allows AI agents to discover products, negotiate pricing, and execute transactions across different platforms without custom API integrations.

  • Direct AI Checkout: A user researching hiking boots in Google Gemini can have their agent complete the purchase directly within the chat interface. The transaction logic is handled by UCP, while the merchant remains the seller of record.

    • Trust Infrastructure: Mastercard Agent Pay

    To facilitate these machine-driven payments, financial infrastructure has adapted. Mastercard Agent Pay creates a trust layer for agentic transactions.

  • Delegated Authority: It uses a "delegated authority" model. A user sets a policy: "You can spend up to $100 on groceries per week." The agent uses a tokenized credential to transact.

    • The "Human" Premium: Content Provenance (C2PA)

    In an internet flooded with synthetic content, reality is a luxury. The industry has standardized around C2PA (Content Credentials).

  • The "Nutrition Label": This attaches tamper-evident metadata to digital files, recording who created them and what tools were used.
  • Why it matters: 90% of consumers consider it important to know if content is AI-generated. Premium brands use C2PA to prove their campaigns feature real humans and authentic products.

    • Enterprise Orchestration: Managing the Fleet

    It is no longer enough to have a chatbot; companies run fleets of specialized agents.

  • Marketing Super Agents: Platforms like Salesforce Agentforce orchestrate strategy. A CMO can command the system to "Plan a Q4 retention campaign," and the Super Agent delegates tasks to sub-agents responsible for audience segmentation, creative generation, and media buying.

    • Enjoyed this perspective?

    Subscribe to our strategy, or let's discuss applying this to your brand.