Agentic commerce and digital identity: a new challenge for Europe
Agentic commerce is no longer a hypothetical concept. It has firmly entered the European technology conversation. Along with it comes a fundamental question: how will the new generation of artificial intelligence agents—capable of executing purchases and transactions—fit into the digital identity ecosystem that the European Union is building?
This is the focus of the Agentic Commerce working group within WE BUILD, part of Work Package 3 – Payments. Its mission is to analyse the impact these agents will have on the EUDI Wallet ecosystem and to deliver a report to the European Commission with the group’s key findings.
The initiative’s first in-person session took place at Amazon’s offices in Amsterdam and brought together leading players from across the value chain. Amazon and Google contributed from the perspective of agents and e-commerce; Visa and Mastercard from financial services; Worldline and Ingenico from the payments sector; and Izertis, along with other companies, as a provider of technology solutions.
Agentic commerce is no longer science fiction
The workshop made one point clear: agentic commerce is no longer science fiction. Its deployment could accelerate within months and fundamentally transform the way people shop online.
The current purchasing logic—based on browsing websites, comparing options, entering data and filling in forms—will evolve into a far more conversational model. It will be enough to give a natural language instruction to a trusted agent, which will manage the entire process from start to finish.
The current purchasing logic will evolve into a more conversational model
One example discussed during the session captures this shift well: asking an agent to purchase food and drinks for a party of 20 people, within a set budget, while optimising the use of loyalty cards to achieve maximum savings.
The agent searches, compares, decides and executes. The user simply defines the objective and criteria.
If the agent buys, who is responsible?
What appears to be a simple operation raises important questions.
For example: what happens if the purchase includes alcohol? How can it be proven that the person who requested the transaction meets the legal age requirement in the country where the transaction takes place? From 2027, if the purchase is made directly on a website, users will likely need to prove their age using an EUDI Wallet credential, in a process as simple as scanning a QR code with a mobile device.
The problem arises when the purchase is not made directly by the individual, but by their digital agent. This is where one of the major challenges currently facing this working group comes into play.
Three open fronts
For now, this new scenario focuses the debate on three main areas.
The first concerns user experience. The key question is whether the agent will be able to interact directly with the EUDI Wallet and request the necessary credentials within the conversation itself, without adding friction or disrupting the process flow.
The debate focuses on three fronts: user experience, legal, and technical
The second area is legal and regulatory. Here, the discussion centres on the role these agents should play within the eIDAS2 framework.
Should they act as a Relying Party, as simple intermediaries, or could they even operate with some form of mandate or representative authority?
The third area is technical. This involves determining how these new actors will integrate with tools such as the Digital Payment Credential and with established standards like FIDO or AP2.
A strategic debate for Europe
What is at stake goes far beyond technology. The rise of agentic commerce requires a redefinition of some of the foundations on which European digital identity will be built in the coming years: who can authorise a transaction, on whose behalf an agent acts, and under what legal and technical guarantees that action is validated.
This is not a secondary debate. It is one that anticipates what the future architecture of trust in Europe will look like. The presence in this working group of companies such as Visa, Mastercard, Amazon and Google, alongside specialists in payments, technology and digital identity, confirms that the market is already preparing for this shift.
In this context, Izertis is not merely an observer, but an active contributor with experience, expertise and the ability to add value. The company has been working for years in digital identity, verifiable credentials and blockchain, and is actively involved in the EUDI Wallet ecosystem through Identfy.
The emergence of so-called Agentic Identity now opens up a new frontier of innovation in which Izertis is already well positioned to provide vision, technological development and real-world experience. What is being discussed today in specialised forums will define tomorrow’s market rules. And Izertis already has a seat at that table.