American Express has launched a developer kit in addition to purchase protection for agentic commerce transactions, the payments company shared with Digital Commerce 360.

Its “Agentic Commerce Experiences” (ACE) developer kit features five key components, Luke Gebb, executive vice president and global head of innovation, told Digital Commerce 360. He described agentic commerce as “a sea change” and “a massive moment in commerce similar to the advent of the web and to mobile, and the major change here being this prospect of autonomous transactions — agents acting on your behalf.”

Agentic commerce refers to artificial intelligence (AI) that can executive tasks on users’ behalf. There are multiple levels to the autonomy at which different AI agents are capable of executing tasks.

The developer kit “focuses on trust, control and visibility when transactions are initiated by an agent and highlights the underlying payments infrastructure necessary around authentication and intent,” according to American Express.

Additionally, by using agents that developers register with American Express, consumers are eligible for “Agent Purchase Protection.” American Express has laid out how consumers can get backing when an agent mistakenly acts on a card member’s behalf.

It said “American Express is already enabling agentic commerce today, including completing AI-assisted transactions with leading AI platform partners, while collaborating with AI companies and industry associations to help define standards and protocols for a secure, seamless agentic payments ecosystem.”

5 ‘components’ of American Express’ agentic commerce developer kit

Gebb broke the ACE developer kit into five “components:”

1. Agent registration. This is the method by which developers register agents to use the kit, Gebb said. American Express gives them an ID “so we know what agent we’re dealing with.”
2. Account enablement. This is the action of a cardmember enrolling in an agent and American Express logging that enrollment. Gebb said American Express “use that registration over time to share personalized offers.”
3. Purchase intent. When a cardmember types in an agentic AI interface to indicate a product they want to buy, the agent would share that with American Express. Gebb said American Express would use that “to do a good job of authorizations and potentially adjudication if there are problems later.”
4. Passing payment credentials. Gebb referred to this as a secure way to know that an individual wants to transact using an AI agent on their behalf. This is when American Express notes that a tokenized credential plays in. It enables the AI agent to follow through on the purchase for which a user expressed direct intent to complete.
5. Cart context. Gebb noted that this fifth element of the process is optional. “If merchants want to share the cart that they pull together as a result of that intent, in order to smooth out any disputes or chargebacks, they can share that with us,” he told Digital Commerce 360.

The fifth component is part of the process of enabling purchase protection in the agentic commerce space, when an AI agent could be the one at fault for transacting on the wrong product or products.

At launch, Gebb said, the developer kit is for external, validated agents. He said American Express will later release its own agent.

How American Express plans to enable agentic commerce

Gebb noted that agents can only make purchases when cardmembers direct that action.

“If there’s no directive, there is no authorization to purchase,” he said.

Gebb gave an example of when the user’s “intent could get complex.” He said a user asks an AI agent to buy supplies for a 3-year-old’s birthday party that includes a unicorn theme. The AI agent might put together a cart with 10 items in it, which it is then ready to check out, demonstrating an agentic commerce example.

“It’s that final piece of information to pull the transaction together,” Gebb told Digital Commerce 360. “The result in our mind is consumer confidence to go and transact, clear controls for the consumers.”

He said American Express envisions that in its mobile app, it can show users “all the places in which your account is stored and all the places in which you have an outstanding intent because maybe you’ve asked three different agents to do different things for you and those intents are outstanding. When purchases come through, match them to the intent so you can see. If you have a problem, you can address it in there.”

He also noted what could happen as agentic commerce “matures a little bit.” A consumer might want a product but not “love the price.”

“You tell your agent: Any time over the next month, if the price declines by whatever, buy it for me,” Gebb said. “That’s a scenario where you might more plausibly buy something without physically being there to click the buy button at the moment of the purchase.”

When an AI agent makes a mistake in a transaction

Gebb said the idea centers around “clear and granular spend controls, knowing what your agents are up to.”

For the merchant, Gebb said, this results in reduced chargebacks and disputes. He also noted that there are already processes by which consumers can dispute merchants’ errors.

“Instead of just a consumer and a merchant, you now have an agent in the transaction flow,” he said.

And when there is a dispute — because an agent makes a mistake, as opposed to the consumer or the merchant — American Express will back the consumer and merchant, he said. 

“If the merchant has made no error and the cardmember has made no error, but the agent has made the error, that’s a new paradigm in agentic commerce today and one that has not been figured out — how to deal with that,” Gebb said.

“As long as we’re dealing with a registered agent who has used our developer kit to come in and register and they’ve shared the customer intent … then we will stand behind that transaction and credit the consumer so they’re not out of pocket,” Gebb said.

As an example, he said if a customer asked for a pair of green shoes and then the agent purchases a non-refundable pair of red shoes, that customer would not eat the cost.

“If we’ve accepted an agent to come in and register, and our consumer — let’s say our cardmember — wants to use that agent and has a certified intent with that agent, and that agent goes and buys and they commit an error, we’re covering that,” Gebb said.

Who is American Express working with on agentic commerce?

Gebb said American Express is “primarily thinking about this as something out of [OpenAI’s] ChatGPT. But we also will develop our own proprietary agent experiences.” He added that, “Really, the purpose of the ACE Developer Kit is really about third-party agents — Claude, ChatGPT, etc.”

In addition, American Express has announced a list of companies acting as “supporting partners” as it builds “for the future of agentic commerce.” Listed in alphabetic order, those are:

1. Adyen
2. Cloudflare
3. Crossmint
4. Delta
5. Expedia
6. Fiserv
7. Forter
8. Global Payments
9. Google
10. Hilton
11. Microsoft
12. Nekuda
13. OpenAI
14. PayPal
15. Stripe
16. VGS

Gebb also noted that American Express has joined announcements with Google on the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and on the x402 protocol from Coinbase.

“What we’re putting out there … is designed to be quite compatible across the majority of what we’ve seen,” Gebb told Digital Commerce 360. “But where we go a step further is no one has yet brought the issuer into the equation (or the bank). That’s where, when you start to have the issuer in the equation, you start to have legitimate financial liability for transactions.”

Referring to other payments technology companies, Gebb said “none of them answer the phone.” He said that’s the “main thing” that American Express is “bringing to the table” to help consumers.

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