Agentic payments are purchases an AI agent makes on behalf of a person or a company. The agent finds the item and pays through a checkout protocol, after the person approves the order or sets limits in advance. The rails are new, the bookkeeping is not. Every agent purchase is still a business expense that needs the merchant's receipt or invoice, its sales tax and a record of who allowed the agent to spend.
What an agentic payment is
In an ordinary online order, a person clicks the buy button. In an agentic payment, software acting for that person does it, from a chat assistant, a procurement tool or a custom workflow. The agent needs a credential that hides the card number, and the merchant needs proof the agent may buy. The programs below address both.
Agentic commerce is the wider term for shopping through agents, from product discovery to delivery. Agentic checkout is the last step, where the order and the payment details are handed to the merchant.
The protocols and programs, as their owners describe them
- Agentic Commerce Protocol (OpenAI and Stripe). Announced on September 29, 2025 with Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, which let US users buy from Etsy sellers inside the chat. ACP is an open standard under the Apache 2.0 license, and Stripe's Shared Payment Token lets an app start a payment without exposing the buyer's card, scoped to one merchant and one basket total. On March 24, 2026, OpenAI wrote that the first Instant Checkout lacked the flexibility it wanted, let merchants use their own checkout and extended ACP to product discovery.
- Visa Intelligent Commerce. Announced on April 30, 2025. Visa describes it as opening its network to developers who build AI agents, with tokenized credentials in place of card details and spending limits and conditions that the consumer sets for what the agent buys.
- Mastercard Agent Pay. Announced on April 29, 2025. It introduced Mastercard Agentic Tokens, requires AI agents to be registered and verified before they pay, and gives consumers control over what an agent may buy. One of Mastercard's examples is a small business agent paying an overseas supplier with a virtual corporate card token.
- Agent Payments Protocol, or AP2 (Google). Announced on September 16, 2025 as an open protocol for cards, real-time bank transfers and stablecoins. It records each purchase in signed mandates: an Intent Mandate holding the user's instructions and limits, and a Cart Mandate fixing the exact items and price the user approved.
Who sells to you, and where the receipt comes from
OpenAI's developer documentation states that OpenAI is not the merchant of record under ACP. Its launch post says the merchant accepts or declines the order, charges the payment through its existing processor and keeps handling shipping, returns, support and customer communication.
The receipt or invoice for an agent purchase therefore comes from the merchant, through the same channel it uses for its other orders. The confirmation an assistant shows in a chat window is a message, not the merchant's receipt.
How agentic checkout works
In OpenAI's documentation, the merchant shares a product feed, ChatGPT passes the order through the protocol, and the merchant sets fulfillment options and accepts or declines before ChatGPT shows the result.
Google's AP2 focuses on proof instead. Google calls the signed chain from intent to cart to payment a non-repudiable audit trail, showing that the user authorized the purchase and that the agent's request matched what the user wanted.
What a business needs for each agent purchase
Existing record-keeping rules apply to agent purchases. The IRS names invoices, credit card receipts and statements and cash register receipts among the supporting documents for a business expense. In Canada, an input tax credit depends on supplier details printed on the invoice. For each agent purchase, keep:
- the itemized receipt or invoice from the merchant, not only the order total;
- the sales tax lines as charged: GST/HST, QST or PST in Canada, state and local sales tax in the US;
- the match between that receipt and the card or bank charge;
- the expense policy or budget the purchase falls under;
- who set up or approved the agent, and what it was allowed to buy.
The last line is the new one. With an agent, approval happens before the purchase, in the limits and instructions someone gave it. Keep that setting with the purchase, the way AP2 keeps the Intent Mandate next to the cart.
Spending controls for agents
The controls the card networks describe for agents resemble the ones finance teams already put on employee cards. Visa's virtual card pages describe single-use cards that each correspond to one invoice, accounts that expire after a set purpose or period, and controls by merchant category code and amount. On October 21, 2026, Visa announced a pilot with BILL and Billtrust in which trusted AI agents help pay approved invoices between businesses. The same release describes Visa Commercial Payment Controls, which set per-transaction limits on spend, merchant category, location and timing.
Inside a company, that can mean one virtual card per agent, with a limit, a merchant category restriction and an end date. Each charge then traces to one agent and one purpose.
Keeping agent purchases on the books with Smartbills
When an agent buys from a merchant that emails its receipts, email receipt capture finds them in a connected Gmail, Outlook, Zoho Mail or IMAP mailbox, Spam and Archive included, and reads the merchant, date, amount and tax. Expense management matches each card transaction to its receipt and checks it against your policy at submission.
Smartbills also works from inside the chat. The Smartbills MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI assistants search expenses, total spend, build and submit expense reports and clear the approvals waiting for you, signed in as you and limited to the permissions your role already has. Every change waits for your confirmation and is logged with the assistant that made it. Payments and bank connections have no MCP tools, and an assistant cannot move money through Smartbills.