DAVID BIRCH
Welcome to ‘A-Commerce’
OpenAI recently launched ‘Operator’, an AI agent that can take control of a web browser to automate e-commerce. It is powered by a computer-using agent (CUA) model that combines the vision capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4o model with the reasoning abilities of more advanced models. What this means is that an agent doesn’t need an API to access services, it can use buttons and navigate menus just as people do. With the advent of CUA, we are now in the era of ‘agentic commerce’ (or as I prefer, ‘a-commerce’). Agents will go online to obtain services, look for an API connection and then, if no such connection is found, it will use the web just as human consumers do now. From there it is a small step to agents obtaining services from other agents, not via ‘traditional’ web interfaces or APIs at all! Agents will be paying other agents, bypassing our existing payment paths completely: true ‘a-commerce’ is coming! As it stands, Operator requires human supervision for certain categories of tasks including, as I am sure you would expect, financial transactions, so that consumers currently need to take back control to enter payment information and complete transactions. But this is an interim step that is only needed because we lack the digital identity infrastructure needed to allow fully autonomous transactions. This is crucial, because ultimately the issue of
liability means that agents will need digital identities, to develop their own reputations and of course audit trails for when things go wrong. Agentic transactions will proceed on the basis of authorisation: when an agent shows up at my bank, for example, and asks to transfer money then the bank needs to identify the agent and then discover whether the agent is authorised to execute the specific transaction. This could be done by having a database of agents and their permissions, but a much better way to do it is to require the agent to present the relevant credential. That credential will contain the public key of the agent, signed with the private key of a bank within whatever framework is being used. Since my bank knows the public key of the other bank it can easily check if the credential is authentic. Big Tech, then, is going to give customers their own agents and it is inevitable that many customers (eg, me) will be only too happy to hand over a great many decisions around financial transactions over to agents, meaning that while I will remain the ultimate customer of the financial institutions, agents acting on my behalf will be the consumers of those institutions’ financial services. What will these AI consumers want? I keep returning to this question, partly because I do not know what the answer is and partly because I think it
is an area of strategic importance (and existential threat) for financial institutions as well as an area of potential opportunity for fintechs. This, then, is a key strategic challenge for 2025: how do you make your services attractive to an AI that doesn’t watch your Super Bowl adverts, doesn’t visit your branches and doesn’t care that you sponsor a Formula 1 team?
AT A GLANCE
David G. W. Birch is an author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services. He is an international keynote speaker and recognised thought leader in digital identity and digital money. David is principal at his advisory practice 15Mb Ltd. and global ambassador for Consult Hyperion, the consulting arm of Fime. He is non-executive chairman of Digiseq Ltd and holds a number of other board-level advisory roles with companies including OneID, PaymentWorks, Au10tix and KYP – Know Your Partner. Dave is also a senior research fellow in the Qatar Centre for Digital Finance at King’s Business School in London, a Forbes contributor and a columnist for Financial World. Website: dgwbirch.com BlueSky: @dgwbirch
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