Agentic Commerce is Here. What Happens to the Point of Sale?

The way we buy has changed. AI agents are no longer just assistants that recommend products. They are becoming decision-makers. Intelligent payment solutions that support agentic commerce can discover options, compare offers, manage preferences, and even complete purchases without the consumer lifting a finger.

Amazon’s Buy for Me and Perplexity’s PayPal integration show how far agentic commerce has already progressed. Visa and Mastercard are building the rails for agent-initiated payments. What began as the opportunity to utilize AI to personalize customer experiences is quickly becoming the path to completely automating shopping.

The consumer is still in the loop, but increasingly at a distance. They are delegating decisions to software. The critical question is: Are retailers, banks, and payment providers ready for this shift?

The five levels of agentic commerce

Retailgentic maps the journey into five levels.

• Level 1: All discovery and checkout is manual, controlled directly by the consumer. Then AI begins to assist with comparisons, surfacing reviews, or highlighting alternatives.
• Level 2: At this stage, agents actively recommend across merchants, shifting discovery upstream but still leaving the final act of payment in human hands.
• Level 3: Agents begin to complete purchases within their own environments. Amazon’s Buy for Me is a clear proof point. Here, the agent itself becomes the point of sale.
• Level 4: Agents evolve into universal wallets, storing credentials, loyalty points, and preferences. Checkout is reduced to the validation of a token.
• Level 5: Commerce becomes fully autonomous. Purchases are predicted, executed, and settled invisibly in the background, with no explicit checkout moment.

Each level pushes the traditional point of sale (POS) further into the background while giving agents greater control over discovery, choice, and purchase.

From checkout counter to trust anchor

For decades, the POS has meant the same thing: a physical terminal in-store, or a checkout page online. It was where intent and payment met. In agentic commerce, the checkout moment fades. An agent might decide to reorder groceries or book train tickets without the consumer even noticing. Yet the POS does not disappear — it transforms.

Instead of a screen that shoppers interact with, the POS becomes the secure edge of the payments network. It is where an agent’s credentials are first transmitted, protected, and routed for validation. The device no longer hosts intent but anchors trust.

Think of it like airport security. Travelers don’t always notice the scanners, but they depend on them to ensure that every passenger entering the terminal is authorized and safe. In agentic commerce, the POS plays a similar role: it ensures that an agent’s transaction is legitimate, that it complies with the rules set by banks and networks, and that loyalty, receipts, and other data flow correctly.

A trip to the store, reimagined

Imagine consumers walking into a local supermarket. Before they even arrive, an AI agent has built their shopping lists and optimized the lists for promotions, loyalty rewards, and availability. As consumers place items in their baskets, the agent cross-checks them against their lists, suggesting alternatives if needed.

When the shoppers are ready to leave, there is no need to queue or present a card. The agent has already pre-authorized the purchase using shoppers’ preferred payment methods. At the exit, the Ingenico terminal securely transmits the agent’s token into the payments network, where the bank validates it. At the same time, the system updates the shoppers’ loyalty accounts and issues a digital receipt directly to the agent’s interface.

From the consumer’s perspective, checkout has disappeared. For the retailer, the POS has shifted from a screen that captures payment to the infrastructure that guarantees trust, compliance, and smooth integration with loyalty and inventory systems. For banks, it is the safeguard at the network’s edge that ensures every agent-driven transaction is legitimate.

Why this matters now

As AI takes a bigger role in purchases and commerce evolves, the risk to retailers is invisibility. AI agents don’t browse perfectly curated collections displayed in key positions in the store. They scan item lists, score, and select. Retailers who don’t offer products and loyalty promotions in a way that agents can read, they’ll lose sales to competitors who do. Furthermore, if a retailer’s POS infrastructure isn’t agent-ready, its stores won’t be considered during AI-based purchasing decisions.

For banks and payment providers, the risk is disintermediation. If agents bypass traditional initiation points, issuers risk losing visibility. But by enabling agent-specific tokens, new fraud models, and rapid dispute handling, banks can enable secure payments while staying at the center of trust.

The opportunity

Agentic commerce is not a futuristic concept. It is already live, reshaping buying patterns. The point of sale will not disappear, but its role is shifting from checkout counter to the unseen infrastructure that keeps machine-driven commerce secure and reliable.

At Ingenico, we are building that future of retail payment solutions now, cloud-native, token-ready, and API-first. The businesses that prepare early won’t just adapt to agentic commerce. They will own the standard.

If your checkout cannot be triggered by software, there will come a time when it will not be triggered at all.