A new report says payment companies are racing to let AI buy things for you, but shops face rival standards and one early test has already been shut down.
AI assistants that can shop and pay for you are being built right now, but nobody has agreed on how the payment side should work. A new Québec FinTech Report, released this week, says the market "standardized before it settled." Shops are left guessing which approach to support.
The report is from Station FinTech Montréal and Toronto-based Fathom4sight. It was released at the 2026 Canada FinTech Forum. One focus is agentic commerce, meaning an AI system that carries out a purchase for a shopper, from finding a product to paying for it.
Big payment companies moved first. In April 2025, Mastercard launched Agent Pay, which uses network tokens (stand-in codes for card numbers) and biometric checks such as fingerprints. One day later, Visa unveiled Intelligent Commerce, which also uses tokens.
Other groups then published their own standards. Google released its Agent Payments Protocol in September 2025. A month later Visa launched a Trusted Agent Protocol, backed in part by Montréal-founded Nuvei. The report also names OpenAI and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol, Google and Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol, and x402, a crypto-based option.
These cover different jobs, and some overlap:
The report says the industry is now trying to make these pieces work together. In April 2026, Google donated its protocol to the FIDO Alliance, a neutral standards body, so it stays open to all platforms. Visa also launched Intelligent Commerce Connect, a single integration meant to let a business accept agent payments across multiple card networks.
Technology is only part of it. In March, OpenAI shut down Instant Checkout, which let ChatGPT users buy products inside the chat. The company cited inaccurate pricing and inventory data and refocused ChatGPT on helping people discover products. The report calls this evidence that the business model remains largely unproven.
Closer to home for the report, Québec now has 296 fintech companies, up from 294 last year. Thirty are in AI and data, and a majority use AI in their operations or products. The report says adoption will depend on whether companies can afford to build these tools.
If you sell online, expect several ways to accept AI-driven purchases and watch which standards survive before committing to any one.
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