The Agentic Commerce Report

Visa published its Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP) this week ¹, a credential and authorisation standard for agents operating within the Visa network. TAP defines token formats, delegation scopes, and revocation mechanisms for agent-initiated transactions. Walmart simultaneously opened a ChatGPT-powered checkout feature to US customers ², the second major retail platform to deploy an agent-initiated purchase flow following ACP Instant Checkout.

McKinsey & Company released a study on agentic commerce adoption ³ documenting conversion rate differentials between agent-assisted and standard purchase flows across a sample of retail deployments. The study covers category-level data on which product types see the largest impact from agent-assisted discovery and checkout.

Visa TAP is the third network-layer protocol published in five weeks, following Google’s AP2 ⁴ and Mastercard’s Agent Pay APIs ⁵. Walmart’s deployment runs on the ChatGPT platform, which also hosts ACP Instant Checkout ⁶; the two features target different entry points — Walmart’s is retailer-initiated via its own product integration, ACP spans any participating merchant.

Three lanes were active in the same week for the first time in the tracking period: Payments (Visa TAP), Pilots (Walmart checkout), and AEO (McKinsey study). The simultaneous activity across protocol publication, live retail deployment, and independent research marks a shift from infrastructure-only weeks.