Andrew Shikiar
Executive Director & Chief Executive Officer, FIDO Alliance
- Autonomous AI agents could manage trillions in commerce by 2030 but face a critical trust gap.
- Unlocking agentic commerce requires cryptographically verifiable human authorization and limits.
- Industry stakeholders must establish open standards to ensure delegated transactions stay secure.
AI agents are already booking travel, comparing prices, negotiating terms and completing purchases on behalf of real people. And this is only the beginning. Analysts including McKinsey estimate agentic commerce could orchestrate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in transactions globally by 2030. That kind of growth would reshape how the world buys and sells online on a timeline measured in just a few short years, not decades.
Yet one question remains unresolved, and it’s the one that determines whether that opportunity is actually realized: when an agent initiates a transaction, who or what is really on the other end, and how would anyone confirm it? Until that question has a reliable answer, agentic commerce will keep hitting the same ceiling: real deployments, real pilot volume, but hesitation every time the stakes get high enough to matter.
The gap isn’t technical capability, as agents can already negotiate, compare and transact faster than a human could supervise them in real time. The gap is trust – and specifically, trust rooted in verified human approval, cryptographically traceable back to the person who granted it. Without that anchor, no merchant, bank or regulator can reliably tell a legitimate agent-initiated purchase from a compromised or malicious one, which will prevent the realization of agentic commerce at scale.
