AI Wants Checkout but Spreedly Says Merchants Keep the Keys
AI Wants Checkout but Spreedly Says Merchants Keep the Keys
Publish Date: 2026-03-10 04:00:00
Source Domain: www.pymnts.com
Every day seems to bring another announcement about artificial intelligence agents that can search, compare and buy on a consumer’s behalf.
The momentum is real. So is the attention. But much of that attention has centered on the technology itself, the interfaces consumers may use and the possibility of a faster path from intent to purchase. What has received less attention is the merchant.
The merchant is still the one that owns the checkout flow, manages the payment relationships, absorbs much of the fraud and chargeback risk, and tries to turn a transaction into a lasting customer relationship. That is the part of the agentic commerce story that Spreedly is trying to bring back into focus.
The payments orchestrator said in a Thursday (March 5) press release that agentic commerce is now live as a channel on its open payments platform. Merchants can process agent-initiated transactions over their existing payment infrastructure, keep their current payment service provider relationships in place and remain the merchant of record.
Enterprise merchants are already testing agent-driven transaction flows, and support for emerging protocols, including Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), is in development, with an initial release targeted for later this quarter, the release said.
That message is different from some of the broader conversations around agentic AI.
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Spreedly is not pitching agentic commerce as a reason for merchants to hand over control. It is pitching it as a new channel that still must work within the economic and operational realities merchants already deal with. Many of the early standards writers seem to understand that point, Spreedly CEO Justin Benson told PYMNTS.
“I think it was pretty telling that many of the specs that are being written, but the position taken early on was you are going to be the merchant of record,” Benson said. “That was really helpful” because…
