By: Shaun Puckrin, Chief Product Officer at GoCardless

The way people shop and pay is changing faster than most realise. Over the next few years, we will see a shift from AI acting as a research assistant to AI acting as an autonomous shopper. We call this agentic commerce.

Instead of just helping a customer decide what to buy, an AI agent will handle the entire transaction – within rules set by the customer – without them ever needing to open an app or reach for a card. Whether it’s automatically renewing a subscription at the best price or managing energy bills, the agent handles the search, the selection, and the payment.

The race for the default 

This isn’t a distant scenario. Morgan Stanley estimates agentic shoppers could represent up to $385 billion in US e-commerce spending by 2030. During Cyber Week 2025, one in five orders already involved an AI agent. Right now, the global payment giants are racing to ensure their card credentials are the default for these machine-to-machine transactions. 

But there is a risk here. If we let established card networks own this space, we are simply embedding old costs and high processing fees into a new era of technology. More importantly for the UK, we risk repeating a familiar pattern of allowing our critical payments infrastructure to be shaped and controlled by overseas schemes rather than home-grown networks.

Card rails were built for humans to swipe, not for software to execute. They rely on expiry dates, physical security codes, and manual interventions that are incompatible with a fully automated economy. Extending this model into agentic commerce reinforces dependency on card schemes, at precisely the moment when the UK has an opportunity to rebalance its payments ecosystem. 

Why A2A is built for AI 

The UK Government’s National Payments Vision wants account-to-account (A2A) payments to be a genuine alternative to cards. We believe A2A is actually better suited for how AI agents need to work.

Agentic payments require what I call structured delegation. Customers need to set precise limits: they need to be able to pause, adjust, or revoke an agent’s spending power instantly. These aren’t features card rails were designed for. However, they are exactly the capabilities that Direct Debit and Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) provide.

Our proprietary research backs this up, with 61% of payers stating that they would trust an AI agent with their payments, but only if they have these types of guardrails in place. A2A is the most natural way to provide that level of control and security.

From theory to testing 

To make this a reality, we have to move beyond the trial phase. 

We cannot afford to wait until the market defaults have already been set by established players. 

That is why GoCardless has joined the FCA’s AI Live Testing programme. We want to test agentic payments in real-world conditions in close collaboration with the regulator, as well as engaging other critical ecosystem participants like Pay.UK and Open Banking Limited. 

Our goal is to move from theory to practice and define a safe, workable framework for A2A in an AI-driven world, which reduces the UK’s over-reliance on international card networks and supports UK payments sovereignty.

The standards for how AI agents pay are being set right now. If we want a competitive payments landscape in the UK, we need to ensure A2A isn’t just an afterthought – it should be the foundation.