Meta’s AI Shopping Push Grows as Agentic Commerce Remains Below 1%

Agentic commerce still accounts for less than 1% of overall e-commerce activity, despite a wave of new AI shopping agents from Meta, Anthropic and other technology companies.

Meta this week launched Muse, a personal AI agent designed to autonomously handle multistep tasks such as shopping, travel bookings, email and project management. Anthropic introduced Commerce Agents, an open-source framework that allows businesses to build consumer shopping agents and merchant-focused operational tools.

Instinct, a messaging-based AI assistant that lets users delegate online errands through text or phone calls, has also gained attention in Silicon Valley. The launches come after OpenAI abandoned Instant Checkout, while Google has concentrated on agentic commerce infrastructure and standards.

Although AI-powered commerce has been viewed as a potential threat to Visa and Mastercard, Bernstein analysts argue that card networks could benefit from increased digital transactions and value-added services. Cards offer established dispute management, payment standards, more than 7 billion credentials and access to over 100 million merchants.

Visa and Mastercard are already developing agentic payment technologies, including Trusted Agent Protocol, Verifiable Intent, Agent Pay and Intelligent Commerce. Bernstein expects all agentic transactions to eventually become tokenized.

Agent-to-agent micropayments remain experimental. Coinbase and Cloudflare's x402 protocol generates roughly $500,000 to $1 million in monthly transaction volume, with an average payment of around $0.20.

Payment processors could also benefit as AI shopping adds complexity for merchants. Adyen launched Adyen Agentic this summer, enabling companies to sell through AI platforms without rebuilding their commerce infrastructure for every new channel.

Generative AI referral traffic is growing rapidly. As of August 2026, GenAI accounted for 39% of referrals to Wayfair, 28% to Walmart, 25% to Target, 23% to Etsy and 22% to eBay. However, AI referrals still represent only 1% to 2% of these retailers' total traffic.

Consumer trust remains another obstacle. A Visa survey found only 23% of consumers trust AI agents to make payments on their behalf.

Bernstein maintains "outperform" ratings on Visa, Mastercard and Adyen, suggesting established payment networks may emerge as major beneficiaries as agentic commerce expands.