Not long from now, your best customer might not be a person at all. It might be an AI agent that wakes up, reads a prompt like "find me new running shoes under $100", compares reviews, and completes the purchase before you have had your morning coffee. No checkout page, no clicks, no typing a card number. Just a quiet, fully automated transaction between two systems that trust each other enough to move money.
This is the world Visa and others are preparing for. Visa has introduced the Trusted Agent Protocol, a framework that allows merchants and issuers to identify when a digital assistant is acting legitimately for a real consumer. Other groups, including the teams behind the Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google’s AP2, are working toward the same goal, helping AI agents shop safely without being mistaken for bots or fraud attempts.
In simple terms, payments are learning to recognize good robots from bad ones. A trusted agent can prove it represents a verified customer; a fake one cannot. These standards are what make it possible for AI to participate in commerce responsibly.
This is the easy part. The harder part is what happens when something goes wrong.
Imagine an AI assistant ordering the wrong item or triggering a charge the customer disputes later. If no human ever clicked "buy", who is responsible for fixing it? The consumer? The agent? The merchant? The issuer? These are the questions now moving from theory to reality.
Disputes in this environment will not rely on paper receipts or screenshots. They will depend on proof that an agent was authorized, that the request was genuine, and that the merchant followed the right steps. Evidence will include the identity of the agent, its signature, and the digital link tying it to the customer at that exact moment. We are entering an era where transaction records come from systems talking to systems, not people talking to people.
For banks, processors, and merchants, this means dispute systems must evolve. They will need to handle new kinds of data and recreate the full path of a machine-driven transaction when something goes wrong. The organizations that prepare now will have a much smoother time when these transactions become routine.
At Lean Industries, we watch these changes closely because they touch the heart of what we do: resolving disputes quickly and correctly. When transactions become more automated, clarity and traceability become even more important. That is where we focus, making sure the right data is captured and the right evidence is available when it is needed.
AI agents will soon be buying, selling, and paying on our behalf. The technology to make that work is already in motion. The question is whether the systems handling disputes are ready for it. Ours are, and if you are not sure yours are, it is time we talk.
