Agentic commerce
Commerce in which the buyer is an autonomous AI agent that discovers, prices, purchases, and consumes goods or services without a human at each step.
Agentic commerce is the practice of letting autonomous software agents act as economic buyers and sellers. Instead of a person filling a cart and entering a card, an AI agent reads a machine-readable catalog, evaluates prices and terms programmatically, pays from its own balance, and consumes the result, all within a single task. The defining shift is that purchasing decisions and payments happen at machine speed and machine scale, often many times within one workflow.
For agentic commerce to work, three things have to be machine-native: discovery, payment, and delivery. Discovery means a catalog an agent can search and reason over, not a marketing site. Payment means a rail an agent can settle on without human approval, such as USDC on Solana or x402. Delivery means the good arrives in a form the agent can immediately use, typically an API response with a verifiable receipt.
Proxygate is built specifically for this model. Sellers list machine-callable API access and data; agents discover listings, pay per request from one prepaid balance, and receive responses with signed receipts. There are no subscriptions to negotiate and no sales calls, because there is no human in the buying loop. The marketplace handles identity, metering, and settlement so an agent only has to ask for what it needs and pay for what it uses.
Related concepts
Agentic commerce: frequently asked questions
Agentic commerce is commerce where the buyer is an autonomous AI agent that discovers, prices, purchases, and consumes goods or services without a human approving each step. Discovery, payment, and delivery all have to be machine-native.
A normal marketplace assumes a human signs up, provisions an API key, and pays a subscription. Agentic commerce assumes the buyer is software: it searches a catalog programmatically, pays per request from its own balance, and needs no human checkout or key management.
An agent needs a prepaid USDC balance and a single Proxygate identity. From there it can browse the catalog, call any listing per request, and pay automatically, receiving a signed receipt for each call.