In An Agentic Commerce World, Fraud Will Be Indistinguishable From Legit
Why purchasing intent is the last irreducibly human part of any transaction, and what 16th century England can teach us about what's next.
The AI futurists are approaching agentic commerce totally backwards.
They believe that the Internet is going to go full dead (as in “99 percent of traffic will be non-human”), and plan for a world in which commerce is done by machines to machines, with no human involvement at all.
And that, if you think about it, is nonsense.
Even if the Internet becomes something you no longer surf, navigate or information-superhighway-drive, there’s something irreducibly human in every purchase that cannot, by design, be automated away: intent.
However impulsive your shopping is, purchasing decisions start with the intent of the human.
That’s why an end-to-end agentic commerce doesn’t make any sense at all.
If AI gets adopted more widely, and we rely less on click and tap and more on vibes and prompts, it’s not the increased traffic or the bad quality code that’s going to be a problem.
It’s that fraud will be indistinguishable from legit.
For that reason, agentic commerce, in order to succeed, will have to rely on the only thing that has to be human.
The intent to buy.
I’m Alvaro Duran, and this is The Payments Engineer Playbook. In this chapter, I want to persuade you that most authentication measures that are now commonplace, such as 3DS, are incompatible with a world in which agentic commerce is the norm.
And I want to present you with an alternative that can work, even when fraudsters use frontier models and you’re stuck with an open source model you downloaded from Hugging Face.
An alternative inspired by 16th century pirates like Francis Drake.
Here’s what you can expect in today’s article:
A metaphor from the days of piracy that reinforces a new approach to AI-mediated commerce
How to use Intent, not Presence, as the core of the authentication process
Enough intro, let’s dive in.
