AI Wants the Checkout but Spreedly Says Merchants Keep the Keys

Every day seems to bring another announcement about artificial intelligence agents that can search, compare and buy on a consumer’s behalf.

The momentum is real. So is the attention. But much of that attention has centered on the technology itself, the interfaces consumers may use and the possibility of a faster path from intent to purchase. What has received less attention is the merchant.

The merchant is still the one that owns the checkout flow, manages the payment relationships, absorbs much of the fraud and chargeback risk, and tries to turn a transaction into a lasting customer relationship. That is the part of the agentic commerce story that Spreedly is trying to bring back into focus.

The payments orchestrator said in a Thursday (March 5) press release that agentic commerce is now live as a channel on its open payments platform. Merchants can process agent-initiated transactions over their existing payment infrastructure, keep their current payment service provider relationships in place and remain the merchant of record.

Enterprise merchants are already testing agent-driven transaction flows, and support for emerging protocols, including Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), is in development, with an initial release targeted for later this quarter, the release said.

That message is different from some of the broader conversations around agentic AI.

Spreedly is not pitching agentic commerce as a reason for merchants to hand over control. It is pitching it as a new channel that still must work within the economic and operational realities merchants already deal with. Many of the early standards writers seem to understand that point, Spreedly CEO Justin Benson told PYMNTS.

“I think it was pretty telling that many of the specs that are being written, but the position taken early on was you are going to be the merchant of record,” Benson said. “That was really helpful” because it showed awareness that “the merchant didn’t want to be disintermediated.”

That does not mean the hard parts are solved. When asked how merchants are thinking about owning the customer relationship in agentic commerce, Benson said the industry is still in discovery mode.

“Anyone who says they’ve got all the answers is not being very transparent,” he said. “We’re all learning this together.”

Spreedly is working through these questions with leading-edge merchants, and “every answer brings up a new question for them,” he said.

That uncertainty is one reason the merchant-of-record issue matters so much.

Not an Event

Checkout is not just a payment event; it is a business engine, Benson said. Merchants use it to shape economics, present payment choices, offer loyalty options and surface cross-sell opportunities. If the agent layer sits between the shopper and the merchant in a way that strips out those options, the merchant may lose more than a few clicks in the checkout process.

“I think that is one thing that’s missed,” Benson said. “In the checkout, there’s a lot happening.”

Merchants are thinking about the economics behind that, along with cross-sell and upsell opportunities, loyalty offers, and whether they want to present their own credit card or buy now, pay later options. For some merchants, a model where “the agent will just do it” could become “a significant threat to their business model,” he said.

There is also the less glamorous issue of responsibility. Merchants should not assume that agentic commerce changes the basic liability structure attached to a transaction, Benson said. They still must think about fraud, liability shifts and chargebacks in much the same way they do now.

In the early phase, merchants will likely view an agent-based transaction with “the same type of liability, same type of responsibility” as a human-initiated one, he said.

That’s where vaulting becomes more important. Spreedly’s announcement described the company’s smart vaulting as a way for consumers to transact without reentering card details while merchants keep control over spend limits, token enforcement, expiration rules and controlled transaction environments. In simple terms, agentic commerce will only work at scale if the stored credentials behind it are handled securely and under merchant-defined rules.

“Vaulting is having a moment again,” Benson said.

“Nobody wants to be involved in handling secure data” because of the cost and risk attached to it, he added. The original promise of vaulting and tokenization was to move sensitive card data “out of scope for a merchant,” which reduced risk and complexity. Now, as agentic commerce develops, that need is returning to center stage.

“It’s almost a back to the future there,” he said.

The Credentials Gap

That leads to the issue of the gap between today’s credential systems and the ones agentic commerce may require, Benson said. A relatively simple one-to-one relationship between a merchant and a payment provider may be manageable. But the model gets more complicated once merchants start dealing with multiple agentic commerce sources, digital wallets and new layers of permissions and issuer requirements.

The opportunity is not only to manage the flow itself, but also to manage “the unique characteristics around that tokenization around that token,” he said.

That framing suggests the real work in agentic commerce may happen below the surface.

The consumer may see a clean prompt and a simple purchase. Behind that, merchants and payments providers may be dealing with a much denser set of credential, token and routing questions than current checkout systems typically expose.

Benson made a similar point when discussing customer experience. One example he raised was travel, where a transaction often does not end when the first authorization is made. Hotel bookings can produce later charges. Merchants may also make real-time decisions about which payment service provider or merchant identity should handle a transaction, and those decisions affect reconciliation on the back end.

Spreedly is also trying to position itself on the open side of the market. The company is not tied to any single AI platform and wants merchants to use one integration to enable payments across emerging AI environments, Benson said, suggesting a practical rather than ideological view of open systems.

Although open standards help the industry move, they can become too generic over time and may give way to more specialized approaches, he said.

“Open standards tend to be very strong in the first one to two to three years,” Benson said. But because they “have to support everybody,” they can become too broad to support deeper niche use cases. That’s why companies like Spreedly expect to support open standards while also preparing for more customized flows later.

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.