January 9, 2026
Today's Briefing: January 9th 2026
NewsAgents Take
Today’s articles underscore two connected but distinct currents in agentic commerce. One is practical: what existing payment systems and enterprise buyers can learn from domains like B2B where outcomes have always been negotiated and conditional. The other is conceptual: as autonomous agents take on more of the cognitive load and more decision power, trust and verification shift from trust in humans to trust in how systems reason and attest to intent. For merchants and risk teams, this suggests a future where capability alone will not be enough; governance, clarity, and accountable outcomes will matter more.
What agentic commerce can learn from B2B payments
This piece argues that the long and often slow evolution of B2B payments has lessons for agentic commerce. In B2B flows, buyers and sellers have always negotiated terms, contingencies, and conditional execution, and risk teams have always had to reconcile intent with settlement outcomes. The relevance for agentic commerce is that autonomous systems will behave more like sophisticated buyers than like simple checkout forms, and existing B2B patterns around agreement, visibility, and reconciliation offer a starting point for designing robust agentic payment logic.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2026/what-agentic-commerce-can-learn-from-b2b-payments/
Agentic commerce, buying, and trust
This Forbes council piece takes a broad view of how autonomous agents are rethinking the experience of buying and the role of trust. The argument is that as agents shoulder more of users’ decision tasks, the locus of trust moves away from brand, interface, or merchant toward the agent’s reasoning process and its attestations of intent. The implication for commerce teams is that trust will increasingly be a matter of verifiable signals and predictable outcomes rather than traditional cues like branding or interface design.
Agentic AI and deepfakes as a service in 2026
A second Forbes council article looks at a related risk surface that will matter for commerce: the rise of deepfakes as a service and the threats that emerge when generative capabilities become commoditised. While not specific to commerce, the connection is clear. As agents take on more agency in interpreting and acting on user signals, systems will need to differentiate between genuine intent and fabricated signals. This has implications for fraud and risk models as well as for how commerce platforms validate identities, permissions, and authorisations under agentic execution.
