A Federal Reserve Governor has put agentic commerce on the official policy agenda. Speaking at Sibos 2026 in Miami on September 29, Governor Christopher J. Waller delivered a speech titled "Payments in the Age of AI Agents," walking through how autonomous agents could reshape payment systems. He also revealed he hosted an industry roundtable on agentic commerce at the Fed earlier this summer.
Highlights#
Waller split agentic commerce into two models. In the agent-assisted model, the buyer uses an agent for search and discovery but keeps control of the purchase and the payment. In the agent-delegated model, the buyer grants the agent authority to shop and pay on their behalf, within constraints and guardrails. He sees consumer-to-business transactions as the first wave, with assisted use cases ahead of delegated ones.
He flagged three trust barriers that must fall before delegated commerce scales. Authentication shifts from proving a buyer is authorized to proving an agent has authority to pay for the buyer. Liability comes down to who pays when an agent buys wrong. And fraud systems calibrated to human behavior will need recalibrating for agent payment patterns.
On rails, he noted that agents will need to operate across a diverse set of payment methods for B2B, which relies on ACH, wire, instant payments, and cards rather than the cards that dominate consumer e-commerce. He also pointed out that agents doing pre-purchase work, like paying for LLM queries, price feeds, and API calls, will drive machine-to-machine micropayments to far larger scale, which favors rails with low flat fees.
Waller closed with open questions: what standards are still missing for agents to carry identity, consent, and payment credentials, and whether the market tips toward platform-specific or interoperable standards.
Why it matters#
The Fed naming authentication, liability, and fraud as the gating problems in agentic commerce matches what escrow-backed settlement and portable on-chain reputation are being built to solve. His micropayments point lands on the low-fee rails question that stablecoin settlement answers today.