The field of agentic commerce—a term that describes the use of bots for online buying and selling—is evolving fast. The latest example came Tuesday when cloud computing firm Cloudflare announced a service that will equip your AI agent to go shopping. That service comes in the form of an identity tool, known as cloudflare.id, that will let merchants confirm that an agent is acting on your behalf, and that is paired with a wallet that can hold funds for your agent to spend.
The announcement reflects a profound change in the nature of the Internet, where bots were long a fairly small portion of traffic and primarily treated as a threat or a nuisance. The rise of AI agents has changed all this. Today, around 57% of web traffic consists of bots, according to Cloudflare’s Chief Strategy Officer, Stephanie Cohen, who added that this development has created a new world of business opportunities.
“The internet needs a different business model. In order to have a different business model, you need payments that actually will support that,” said Cohen. “And so, if you look at what Cloudflare has been building towards, we’ve been building towards that future, which is that every interaction on the internet is a chance for commerce.”
As a practical matter, Cloudflare’s new identity service provides any user with a bot-readable identity in the form of a permanent web address. The user can then assign that identity to various agents to tell a merchant bot who they are (though there is also an option to remain pseudonymous).
The payment portion of Cloudflare’s arrangement, meanwhile, involves the user creating a virtual wallet that is funded by a bank transfer that is converted into a dollar-pegged currency known as stablecoins. The user can then grant permission to their agent to access the wallet and make purchases on their behalf.
As a safeguard against rogue agents going on spending sprees, the so-called Cloudflare Wallets also come with optional guardrails that include spending limits and a whitelist of merchants where a user’s agents can go shopping.
Cloudflare, predictably, has also built a set of AI tools for merchants so that they can communicate with customer agents that are seeking information or that wish to make a purchase.
The emerging world of AI-powered commerce
Cloudflare’s Cohen pointed out that a very basic version of agentic commerce has been around for years in the form of services like Amazon’s “Subscribe and Save”, which entails a customer creating a bot that can request recurring orders of a given product. But in the last two years, the likes of Claude and ChatGPT have dramatically expanded the capacities of agents—and, in doing so, have spurred a rethinking of how the internet itself works.
According to Cohen, the internet has long been constructed around HTML webpages, which are designed to be intuitive for both users and developers. But a bot-first internet can be designed differently, she says. If it is a bot doing the browsing, then there is no need for a lot of the content that goes into an HTML page, and the information can instead be conveyed in a shorter, machine-focused fashion.
Cohen also notes that the information on the current version of the internet, including data platforms and news sites like this one, is sold in the form of subscriptions that let the user pay once for a bundle of content—and even that process amounts to friction for human users. Bots, however, do not mind having to carry out dozens or hundreds of individual transactions—meaning that information and data of all sorts can now be sold piecemeal, often for pennies, to thousands or millions of AI agents holding stablecoins.
In the short term, Cohen says, it is likely to be tech savvy developers and AI companies looking to purchase data that are going to be at the forefront of agent-driven commerce. In time, there will be a second wave of agentic commerce powered by ordinary consumers. For this time to take off, though, it will require companies like Cloudflare and others to build easy-to-use shopping agents.
At the same time, regulators will need to develop rules to facilitate AI-based commerce, while merchant companies and payment processors learn to address issues related to fraud and bad actors. The technology, though, is rapidly falling into place. That includes open source protocols for AI commerce like the X402 regime developed by a consortium that includes Coinbase, Cloudflare and Stripe. Incumbents like Visa and Mastercard, meanwhile, are rapidly retooling their payment rails to accommodate the new bot shopping economy.
Cloudflare is not the only firm offering wallets for AI shopping. Last week, the crypto-native payments firm Moonpay unveiled a universal, decentralized AI wallet called PayBox that is designed for non-technical Claude and OpenAI consumers.
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