Designing the Commerce Stack for Autonomous Agents: Transforming Payments, Risk, and Identity
Keywords:
Agentic commerce, Autonomous agents, Decentralized identity, Digital identity, Governance frameworks, Machine-to-machine transactions, Payment systems, Risk managementAbstract
Autonomous software agents are increasingly executing commercial decisions that were historically authorized, interpreted, and governed by humans. Existing commerce stacks, including payment rails, fraud systems, identity frameworks, and dispute processes, are structurally optimized for human intent and manual oversight. As a result, they fail to support high-frequency, delegated, and machine-executed transactions without introducing unacceptable risk, ambiguity in liability, and governance friction. This paper argues that autonomous commerce requires a distinct, execution-oriented commerce stack that treats authorization, risk, identity, liability, and governance as machine-enforceable primitives rather than external controls. The paper proposes the Autonomous Commerce Stack Framework (ACSF), a layered architecture designed to support agent-initiated transactions through policy-bound execution, continuous behavioral risk monitoring, machine-native identity, and embedded accountability mechanisms. Unlike prior work that treats payments, risk, and identity in isolation, ACSF integrates these concerns into a unified system in which governance and liability are enforced at transaction time rather than retroactively. The framework is developed through a systematic synthesis of interdisciplinary literature spanning payment systems, autonomous agents, digital identity, and AI governance, and refined through semi-structured interviews with domain experts in payments, risk, and enterprise automation. Findings highlight fundamental breakdowns in human-centric authorization models, static identity systems, and post hoc liability regimes when applied to autonomous agents. The ACSF offers a concrete architectural blueprint and transaction semantics to guide the design of scalable, auditable, and policy-compliant autonomous commerce systems.
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