Agentic commerce was one of the loudest e-commerce trends of 2025 — but is it real demand or mostly hype + incentives?

In this episode of Payments FM, Nikita sits down with Colin Luce, Founder & CEO of Basis Theory, to unpack what’s actually happening in agentic commerce and agentic payments right now, what merchants should do today, and why trust + tokenization might decide how this all plays out.

We cover:

• The real blocker: messy merchant data and product availability

• Embedded checkout vs “true agents transacting on your behalf”

• Why virtual cards would be a bad end-state for the ecosystem

• ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol), platform incentives, and “who owns the customer?”

• Where agentic payments may show real near-term value (hint: not the sexy B2C stuff)

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Chapters

01:36 Welcome Colin Luce (Basis Theory)

02:23 FOMO, hype, and incentives driving adoption

06:04 What merchants should do first (traffic, data, readiness)

12:36 Payments realities: embedded checkout vs true agent payments

19:37 Are today’s demos “magic”? (disappointing discovery, data quality)

23:50 Best use cases + where agentic commerce really helps

34:26 Protocols, ACP momentum, and merchant voice

41:31 Who should store the payment credential? (trust + tokenization)

44:59 Chargebacks & liability in an agent-driven world

46:23 Cybersecurity risks in the rush to ship

49:49 Biggest blocker in payments: behavior change

54:01 One elevator tip to improve payment performance

#payments #ecommerce #fintech #tokenization #agenticcommerce #ai