Topic starter
07/06/2026 8:45 pm
TL;DR: Agentic commerce shifts buying, negotiation, and payment from human users to AI agents, making verified, privacy-preserving, interoperable identity the control plane for trust, payments, and customer experience, according to OneSpan. Passwordless access, machine-readable catalogues, and agent delegation controls become necessary because shared credentials and CAPTCHA do not scale to agent-to-agent commerce.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by OneSpan: “Sécuriser l'identité à l'ère du commerce agentique”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when merchants rely on shared credentials for agentic commerce?
A: Shared credentials destroy provenance and make delegation unverifiable.
Q: Why do agent-mediated payments require privacy-preserving identity verification?
A: Because the merchant needs assurance without collecting unnecessary personal data.
Q: How should teams design for machine-readable trust in commerce flows?
A: Treat catalogue data, terms, identity assertions and policy statements as consumable inputs for software agents.
Practitioner guidance
- Define delegated agent authority Map which purchase, payment and fulfilment actions an agent may perform without human re-approval, then tie each action to a separate delegation scope instead of a shared customer session.
- Replace shared credentials with verifiable credentials Stop treating agent access as a password-sharing problem.
- Publish machine-readable commerce signals Expose catalogues, terms and policy signals in a format software agents can parse so that shortlist, compare and purchase flows do not depend on brittle screen scraping or manual review.
Bottom line: Agentic commerce shifts the security problem from user login to delegated transaction authority.
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08/06/2026 8:26 am
Agentic commerce turns identity into the control plane for buying. The article is right to treat identity as infrastructure rather than a back-office control. Once agents can negotiate and transact, the trust question moves from who logged in to what authority the agent carries, how far that authority extends and whether the merchant can validate it. Practitioners should read this as a delegation-governance problem, not a checkout UX problem.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the difference between passkeys and delegated agent credentials in commerce?
A: Passkeys verify a human or device at login, while delegated agent credentials prove what a software agent is allowed to do after login. Both reduce reliance on passwords, but only delegated credentials express transaction scope, issuer confidence and ongoing authority for autonomous purchasing workflows.
👉 Read our full editorial: Agentic commerce raises the identity bar for payments and trust