Amex Playbook Helps Merchants Prepare for Agentic Commerce

American Express has released a new business guide designed to help companies get ready for agentic commerce — a shift in which AI agents increasingly shape how customers search, evaluate, and buy. The company announced the Amex Business Playbook for Agentic Commerce on October 6, 2026, according to Business Wire, framing the guide as practical help for merchants navigating a moment when shoppers may never see a checkout button at all.

The timing reflects how fast expectations are moving. In new research accompanying the launch, 62 percent of merchants said they expect AI agents shopping on behalf of customers to have a moderate or significant impact on their business in the next year, according to the company's Amex Trendex survey. The survey, conducted by Teneo among 502 U.S. business leaders in August 2026, sampled companies that accept online or mobile payments.

What the playbook actually covers

The guide is organized into five chapters. The opening section, "Agentic Commerce 101," sets out the basics of how agentic commerce works, while later chapters tackle the practical questions merchants are already asking. One chapter focuses on how to be found and recommended by AI systems. Another addresses how to make AI-driven transactions work in an existing business. A third covers what companies need to know to support trustworthy AI-assisted transactions. The final chapter looks at how businesses can stand out when AI narrows the range of choices a customer ever sees.

Those questions cut to the heart of the transition. According to Business Wire's release, the playbook is built around the questions businesses keep raising: will AI find and recommend my business, how should a company prepare for AI-assisted purchases, and how can a merchant maintain trust and stand out when an agent does the browsing? The answers matter because agentic commerce changes the customer relationship — a shopper who delegates purchases to an agent stops comparing storefronts directly.

American Express is also establishing a pilot Merchant AI Advisory Council to bring merchant perspectives into how its approach evolves. The council is intended to give businesses across industries a forum to share insights as AI-enabled commerce develops, and to inform what the company does next.

A broader industry push toward agent-led shopping

The playbook is the latest move in a longer American Express effort around agentic commerce. Earlier this year, the company introduced the Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit and announced Amex Agent Purchase Protection, which it described as an industry-first intention to protect eligible card members and merchants from charges caused by errors from registered AI agents, according to Business Wire. The company is also working with industry organizations and partners on common standards intended to make it easier for merchants to take part in agentic commerce across different companies and platforms.

Rivals and partners are building the same rails. Morgan Stanley has estimated that U.S. bot-driven sales could reach between 190 billion and 385 billion dollars by 2030, according to PaymentWeek's reporting on the company's payments strategy. Networks and processors across the industry are now racing to standardize how agents are registered, how cardholder permissions are expressed, and how intent data moves between agents, merchants, and payment networks.

The demand side, however, is moving faster than the payment step. According to a roundup published by Majormatters, which tallied eighteen months of agentic commerce development, shopping with AI has become mainstream while paying with it has not. The tally counts nine live initiatives — including Amex's purchase protection for registered agents — alongside a handful of pilots and published specifications. On the demand side, PYMNTS Intelligence found that 56 percent of U.S. consumers would let an AI search and compare, and 37 percent would authorize a payment through it. Visa polling found 60 percent of consumers would not let an agent spend without approval. Shopify reported AI-driven traffic and orders each tripling year on year, while Adobe measured a 693 percent rise in AI-referred retail traffic across the 2025 holidays.

That gap — shoppers happy to let agents browse, but cautious about letting them pay — is exactly where trust frameworks come in. It is also why agent purchase protections and registered-agent programs have become a competitive battleground for the card networks.

Why merchants should pay attention now

Amex's message to merchants is that agentic commerce could be the most significant change in shopping and purchasing behavior since the start of e-commerce, according to Anna Marrs, the company's group president of Global Merchant and Network Services, as reported by Business Wire. She pointed to the company's long history of helping merchants navigate shifts from small business campaigns to e-commerce and contactless payments, and said the company is focused on helping businesses understand what is changing, prepare for what comes next, and capture the opportunities ahead.

For AI agents themselves, the guide is a useful signal of where the plumbing is headed. Registered-agent ecosystems, consent tooling, and merchant advisory councils are the infrastructure that will decide which agents can transact — and on what terms. Agents that can prove identity, permissions, and auditability will find doors open. Those that cannot will find the rails closed to them. Coverage of adjacent agentic commerce moves shows the pattern repeating: see our reporting on Constructor's agentic checkout with Stripe and TikTok's shopping assistant with one-click checkout for how other platforms are approaching agent-led purchasing.

The merchant council and the playbook suggest the next phase of agentic commerce will be negotiated with sellers, not just imposed on them. Whether agents become a channel merchants welcome or a layer that disintermediates them will depend on who sets the terms — and right now, the biggest card networks are competing to write them.