Retailers and payment providers still have some thinking time left until August 14, 2026. That’s the date when a new industry standard meant to make AI shopping agents accountable when something goes wrong is activated. After that date, the draft closes to comment and moves toward a stable release.
The suggested standard is called the A-Comm Evidence Protocol (AEP). It is published by A-Comm Technologies, a fintech company founded by former Visa payments executives. The standard addresses transaction evidence issue, which is not less important than tech capabilities, once AI agents start buying things on people’s behalf. When a shopping bot picks the wrong item, gets overcharged, or acts without real authorization, there’s currently no shared way to prove what actually happened.
New research shows why it matters. The Adyen Index 2026 Australia Retail Report found that 95% of retailers are now familiar with agentic commerce. Nevertheless, while many people know what that is, they do not necessarily like or trust the concept. Thus, 64% of consumers say they’re still uncomfortable letting an AI complete a purchase for them. Retailers are ready to build. Unfortunately, shoppers aren’t ready to trust it.
AEP tries to close that gap by creating a record of every step an AI agent takes during a purchase: discovering a product, forming intent to buy, getting authorization, and completing the transaction. Each step is logged as a sealed, tamper-evident entry, similar to how a flight recorder logs a plane’s data. If a dispute happens later, any party in the transaction chain, be it the shopper, the merchant, or the bank, can pull that record and independently verify what the agent actually did, rather than relying on one company’s account of events.
“For agentic commerce to scale, it needs to be observable, traceable, and auditable,” said Krystal Gracier, founder and CEO of A-Comm. “No single company can build an ecosystem of trust on its own. We published AEP as an open draft for public comment because a standard everyone trusts has to be one everyone helps build.”
Importantly, AEP doesn’t compete with the payment protocols already used in agentic commerce. Instead, it acts as a neutral witness, making records but not deciding who’s at fault. The protocol is open-source, free to use under an Apache 2.0 license, and open to comment from anyone building or securing AI checkout systems.
The push to finalize a standard now is tied to a narrow window. Salesforce data revealed that AI influenced 20% of global online sales during the 2025 holiday season. Meanwhile, this year’s holiday shopping period, which the National Retail Federation, in turn, says generates roughly 19% of annual retail revenue, is expected to be the first time agent-led purchases hit real payment authorization at meaningful scale. That leaves only a few months for the industry to agree on ground rules before AI-driven checkout becomes a mainstream part of holiday shopping.
