Imagine you’re headed to the airport for a last-minute work trip to Vancouver. Your AI assistant has already checked traffic, booked your ride, and reordered your allergy meds for pickup along the way. While you were sleeping, it also arranged early check-in at your hotel, upgraded your room using unused loyalty points, and booked a meeting room at a nearby coworking space—all without needing so much as a verification code or even your input.
This isn’t some far-off fantasy. It’s a glimpse into the world of agentic commerce, a topic David Birch and I explored in the Journal of Payments Strategy & Systems earlier this year. It marks a shift in how transactions are made, where autonomous agents move from simply assisting to actually acting on your behalf—initiating and completing payments, negotiating with other agents, and making decisions based on your defined rules and preferences.
In this world, a transaction doesn’t necessarily start with a tap or click. It might be triggered by your car scheduling its next maintenance appointment, or by your content curation bot assembling a personalized news feed and compensating creators along the way. Transactions become continuous, contextual, and in many cases, invisible.
Needless to say, this shift raises big questions—about infrastructure and security, yes, but also about trust, identity, and economic agency. When bots transact with each other, what happens to the systems we’ve built to influence or protect human decision-makers? It’s one thing to make payments faster. It’s another to rethink who—or what—is making them in the first place.
For Canada, the stakes are high. As AI agents begin to act on our behalf, the infrastructure they rely on will shape more than just how money moves. It will determine who sets the rules, who holds the data, and whose values are embedded in the system. If Canadian consumers and businesses rely on bots powered by foreign infrastructure—using foreign wallets, running on foreign rails—we risk losing economic competitiveness and our digital sovereignty.
With the rise of agentic commerce, I believe any conversation about the future of payments starts with the future of agency itself. Who decides how our data is used? Which networks our transactions flow through? Which standards govern AI-to-AI interactions? Canada has the talent, institutions, and regulatory maturity to lead. But first, we must act.
That means creating a roadmap for agentic infrastructure, building partnerships with Canadian AI innovators, and embedding principles like privacy, inclusion, and transparency into the foundations of this new economy. We’ve seen what happens when we wait too long to shape emerging technologies. We end up adapting to rules and standards set without us. Agentic commerce offers a chance to do things differently: to build systems that reflect Canadian values, lift up Canadian businesses, and make us a stronger and more resilient country.
One piece of that future is the evolution of the digital wallet. We’ve long thought of wallets as tools of convenience—from Ötzi the Iceman carrying his essentials 5,000 years ago to the leather pouches and billfolds of Renaissance merchants. But in this next phase, they become tools of productivity—something we need more of in Canada. When powered by the right infrastructure, smart wallets can enable a future where agentic transactions are secure, transparent, and inclusive, while reflecting the values we want baked into the system.
This is what we’re building toward with our new Financial Institution-powered wallet designed specifically for Canadians. While in many ways we’re just getting started with the product, it lays the groundwork for future experiences that build on everything Canadians already love about Interac—security, speed, convenience, accessibility—to power autonomous agents acting on our behalf. In the future, an AI assistant could authenticate itself, access verified data, and carry out conditional payments on your behalf, all within a Canadian network built on trust.
Agentic commerce opens the door to immense opportunity. By delegating repetitive, time-consuming tasks to autonomous agents, we can achieve new levels of efficiency, convenience, and economic productivity. Bots could optimize financial decisions in real time, automate tedious tasks like mortgage shopping or managing subscriptions, and make smart, data-driven choices based on individual preferences. For me, this is where the promise of agentic commerce really shines—reducing barriers to access and helping more people, especially those in underserved communities, navigate complex systems with support they can trust.
But that same promise also comes with serious risk. If we don’t design agentic systems thoughtfully—or if we simply import them from elsewhere—we risk embedding bias, losing transparency, and ceding control. If the bots acting on our behalf run on foreign infrastructure or prioritize commercial incentives over Canadian values, we could lose control over everything from privacy to policy. And if only certain groups have access to trusted, secure agents—ones that act ethically and protect their users—agentic commerce could deepen inequality. Those same underserved communities could find themselves subject to opaque algorithms and exploitative systems, and end up further left behind.
To mitigate these risks and prepare Canadians for an agentic future, we need governance. Guardrails. A roadmap. And infrastructure built on privacy, inclusion, and sovereignty. Agentic commerce offers a new foundation for how economic activity happens in our country. The question now is whether we shape that foundation ourselves, or let someone else write the rules.
