The survey numbers are hard to ignore
PYMNTS and Visa published their Global Digital Shopping Index in June 2026, surveying 1,185 merchants across the US, Brazil, and the UAE. Two numbers stood out. 87% of merchants said their checkout experience still falls short of what customers expect. And 63% said they are exploring or actively planning to accept payments initiated by AI agents rather than human buyers.
That second number deserves a pause. Nearly two thirds of the merchants surveyed are not asking whether AI will change commerce. They are working on how to handle it.
Most merchants cannot even track AI traffic today
The gap between intent and capability is wide. The same merchants exploring agentic payments admit they cannot reliably distinguish between a human browsing their site and an AI agent doing the same thing. Transaction logs do not flag whether the buyer was a person clicking through a checkout flow or a software agent calling an API on someone’s behalf.
That matters because the payment behavior is different. An AI agent does not abandon a cart because the page loaded slowly. It does not get distracted by a competitor’s ad. But it also does not respond to upsells, does not browse product pages for inspiration, and does not leave a review. The conversion funnel looks different when the customer is software.
Merchant apps are already outperforming websites
The same index found that merchant owned apps are outperforming both websites and physical stores as sales channels. The reasons are mechanical: push notifications drive repeat visits, stored payment credentials reduce checkout friction, and the app environment gives the merchant more control over the experience than a mobile browser does.
This connects to the agentic AI question directly. An AI agent interacting with a merchant’s API endpoint is, functionally, a super efficient version of the app experience. The credentials are stored. The payment method is preauthorized. The friction is zero. If merchants are already seeing better results from app based commerce than from web based commerce, the AI agent channel is that same trend pushed to its logical conclusion.
What this means for a merchant processing 200 transactions a day
The survey covered large enterprises and mid market merchants. But the implications reach smaller operators too. A hotel in the Caribbean that processes 200 transactions a day does not need to build an AI agent integration. What it needs is a checkout that works when an AI agent sends a guest to book a room.
That means a hosted checkout page that loads fast, accepts stored credentials, supports tokenized payments, and returns structured confirmation data. It means payment links that work in any context, whether a human clicks them in a WhatsApp message or an AI agent opens them programmatically. The technical requirements for serving AI driven commerce are, for now, the same requirements for serving human customers well.
The difference is that the merchants who get checkout right for humans will be ready for AI agents without additional work. The ones who are still forcing customers through 4 page redirect flows will struggle with both.
CX Pay builds hosted checkout, payment links, and API integrations across 30+ Caribbean and Latin American territories. The infrastructure that handles a tourist paying for a dive trip today is the same infrastructure that will handle an AI agent booking that trip tomorrow. The shift is coming, the question is whether the plumbing is already in place.
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