Industry leaders at Fed-hosted panel urge open standards, shared tokens for agentic commerce

At a Federal Reserve–hosted panel on AI and payments, industry leaders said open protocols and new tokenized payment methods will be critical as AI agents begin to execute transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses.

Matt Marcus, cofounder and CEO of Modern Treasury and the session moderator, told the panel the industry should consider multiple rails for agentic commerce, including card networks, stablecoins and real-time systems such as FedNow. "There are different rails available for agentic commerce," Marcus said, and each rail will need to meet high standards for what information it carries and how agents interact with merchants.

Emily Sands, head of data and AI at Stripe, described agentic commerce as a spectrum in which an agent may perform everything from recommending a product to executing a purchase on behalf of a user. She said merchants must provide a clear, machine-readable description of products, pricing and inventory so agents can transact reliably. "Agentic commerce is actually a spectrum," Sands said. "Businesses need to have a way to crisply articulate what they sell, their products, their prices, their inventory, their checkout experience to agents."

To limit exposure of consumer credentials, Sands described Stripe's "shared payment token," a tokenization approach that passes single-use, merchant-approved credentials (plus integrated fraud scores) from an agent to a merchant. "We are passing over the tokenized credentials needed to make the transaction for the product on the merchant that you have approved and nothing beyond that," Sands said, describing the mechanism as similar in principle to virtual single-use cards issued for human delivery agents.

Panelists emphasized open, interoperable standards. Rich Woodman, who leads Google Cloud's global crypto strategy, highlighted the agent payment protocol work (referred to in the discussion as AP2 and related standards) as a way to let merchants, agents and payment providers interoperate without creating closed, proprietary islands.

Stablecoins and on-chain rails drew sustained attention. Alicia Haas, chief financial officer of Coinbase, said stablecoins have crossed $300,000,000,000 in market capitalization and listed regulatory clarity, blockchain scaling and interoperability as adoption catalysts. "Stablecoins are uniquely suited to micropayments," Haas said, and she argued they offer tools — such as on-chain visibility, whitelisting/blacklisting and the ability to freeze or seize assets through legal process — that can be part of fraud mitigation strategies.

Panelists noted trade-offs. Coinbase's Haas said stablecoins remove chargebacks and create finality for merchants while providing new data for on-chain risk models. Sands and Woodman said the industry needs layered fraud controls and standards for privacy, auditability and consent so agents do not gain access to consumers' full payment credentials.

The panel also raised existing public-rail work: Marcus pointed to FedNow as a potential carrier of richer request-for-pay information that could support agent use cases if standards evolve accordingly.

The session moved into audience questions and practical demos, with panelists citing examples of instant-checkout agents and travel-booking agents that demonstrate the incremental, controlled ways agentic commerce can appear in consumer and B2B settings. The panel closed with thanks to the Federal Reserve and an invitation for continued public–private collaboration on standards and safety.

What happens next: panelists urged more cross-industry cooperation on open standards, incremental deployment of tokenized credentialing and continued public-private dialogue about rails and legal safeguards.