Agentic Commerce Is Web-to-Mobile Again, and Neutrality Wins

If you’re selling something online these days, you’ll have vendors coming to you with pitches for integration commitments over the next few months – if you haven’t already. It’s got me thinking: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before. 

The year was 2014. We were all dumping ice water on our heads, wondering what happened to that flappy bird, and trying to figure out how to get that one album off our phone that just… showed up for some reason. 

Back then, some of the biggest retailers in the US were sure they knew exactly how mobile checkout would work. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, CVS, and others formed the Merchant Customer Exchange to build a wallet of their own called CurrentC. MCX required member stores to refuse other mobile payment options. Then Apple Pay launched that fall.

CurrentC reached a beta in Columbus, Ohio, in September 2015. By June 2016, CurrentC had shut down. Most of its members had already started accepting other wallets.

Fast forward to 2025, and Walmart had signed up early for another single-interface bet. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT, running on the Agentic Commerce Protocol that OpenAI built together with Stripe. More than a million Shopify merchants got the pitch. 

Somewhere around 30 went live. Walmart saw shoppers there convert at a third of its own site’s rate, PYMNTS reported. By March 2026, in-chat checkout was gone.

Both of these bets were very reasonably made, one assumes with some serious data to back them up. But there is a lesson to be learned from that story, because agentic commerce appears to be following the same curve that mobile did. 

Let’s dig in. 

How the mobile shift actually played out

The move to mobile checkout took a few years, playing out in four overlapping stages. 

First, the interfaces started to multiply. Merchants had to choose between building mobile sites and apps, all while competing phone designs and operating systems made the audience split even further. We watched carriers and phone makers as they launched wallets of their own. Meanwhile, retailers answered with CurrentC, and every other wallet showed itself the front door.

But from there, we saw the veracity of those wallets start to crumble. CurrentC is just one example, but it’s the one we were all watching, and the one we all remember. Softcard, the carrier-backed wallet that had changed its name from the unfortunate moniker, Isis, is another. Google bought Softcard’s technology in 2015, and that one ended up shutting down soon after.

The next big stage was the convergence of rails. March, 2014 saw EMVCo, the standards body the major card networks jointly own, publishing its first specification for payment tokenization. The spec gave every wallet one shared way to swap card numbers for tokens. Apple Pay shipped on them that fall. Competitors agreed on the plumbing, but they continued to fight over the storefront.

Finally, volume took a while to climb and much longer than anyone had anticipated. Adobe Analytics data shows mobile’s share of US ecommerce spend went from 40% in the 2020 holiday season to 47.7% by July 2024. Well over a decade after the first iPhone, mobile was only just crossing half.

A frustrating launch for a lot of investors, to be certain.The choices, the fight for standards, and the search for customers willing to move from their laptops to buy something took their toll, and the parallels between then and now are frighteningly close. 

It’s also worth mentioning here that this is very much the North American side of mobile. Other regions have grown mobile-first economies by leaps and bounds in just a few short years, mostly out of necessity and access. That, however, is another story. 

Agentic commerce is on the same curve

Let’s line the two different checkouts up against each other and see where they fit. 

First, the interfaces are multiplying. Six major AI shopping surfaces are live, and each one runs on a different payment stack, according to Taylor Sicard’s tracker:

1. ChatGPT: ACP, routed through retailer apps
2. Google AI Mode: the Universal Commerce Protocol
3. Perplexity: PayPal
4. Microsoft Copilot: a mix of PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe
5. Meta Muse: Stripe Link
6. Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping: Amazon’s own network

We’ve also seen the wallet fail. Instant Checkout didn’t reach its first birthday. ChatGPT is currently sending shoppers to retailer apps instead.

We’re also seeing the rails start to converge. Google donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance in April 2026, with the stated goal of keeping the protocol “platform-agnostic and community-led.” The announcement names Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Adyen, and Worldpay as participants. 

Visa built its Trusted Agent Protocol to work with ACP, AP2, and x402, not against them. It's a smart call. The industry did the same with tokenization through EMVCo in 2014, and it's a big reason that standard worked.

And just like mobile, the volume is a little scattered at the beginning. PYMNTS Intelligence found that 23% of US consumers now start shopping research with AI. Six in ten AI-assisted purchases still complete on Amazon. So, discovery and payment are unconsciously coupling the same way Gwyneth and Chris did back in 2014.

Clever pop culture references aside, it’s worth treating the comparison as an analogy and holding off on forecasts. Nobody measures agentic checkout volume across interfaces the way Adobe measured devices, not for any other reason than that data simply doesn’t exist yet for agentic commerce. The stages, though, are still arriving in the same order.

The neutrality discussion is all about the source

In the rush to build a mobile-first economy in the US, wallet owners clamored to get everyone's commitment to their system. Which is exactly what we’re getting now. 

Stripe describes ACP as “open source, Apache 2.0 licensed, and community-designed.” That’s accurate as regards the license. Stripe also built ACP with OpenAI to power checkout inside ChatGPT. A processor that co-built the protocol behind one interface has a real reason to want that interface to succeed more than the other five. 

Spreedly has taken a different approach. Ours points toward connecting merchants to every agent, because we don’t own one. Test every pitch, ours included. When a vendor tells you which agent to bet on, ask what that vendor owns.

What does neutrality mean in agentic commerce?

Neutrality in agentic commerce means your payment infrastructure can accept transactions from any AI agent or protocol without tying you to one interface. When a specific app or model changes how it handles payments, your checkout keeps working. The merchants who won the mobile race held this exact position.

Here are some questions you should ask in your next vendor meeting. They’ll help you figure out what’s a durable option from a flop pretty quickly.

1. If this agent changes its checkout flow next quarter, what breaks on our side?
2. How many protocols does this connect us to, and what does adding the next one cost?
3. Who holds our customers’ payment credentials if we leave?

You’ll want to really hone in on that third one. Tokenized credentials let merchants move from desktop to mobile wallets without starting over. They’ll do the same thing for merchants who want to span across agents. 

That explains the vaulting revival.

Last March, we made agentic commerce a live channel for merchants and started building ACP and UCP support behind a single integration. Merchants keep their vault and routing while agents come and go, and never have to rebuild when the next one comes along.

Mobile won. The single wallet lost

Mobile took over, just more slowly than anyone predicted, and the merchants who stayed connectable rode the whole multi-year climb. CurrentC proved only that one front door was a bad bet. Instant Checkout is teaching the same lesson about agentic commerce eleven years later.

The interfaces will keep shifting, and at least one of them will probably change course again before this time next year. Staying connectable lets you take part in every stage of this shift. Start with the credentials question. 

Ask every agentic commerce vendor on your list who holds your tokens if you leave, then download the State of Checkout 2026 Report.