Agentic Commerce

Last week at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, the atmosphere wasn't just electric; it was transactional. For years, we've treated AI agents as sophisticated researchers. We'd ask them to find a flight, compare hotel prices, or draft an email. But the "read-only" era of AI is officially dead. We have entered the era of the Autonomous Transactional Proxy.

The headline that caught everyone by surprise wasn't a new LLM benchmark. It was Mastercard’s India-first demonstration of a fully authenticated agentic transaction. For the first time, a human didn't just 'authorize' a payment; an AI agent, acting within a strictly scoped governance framework, located a product, negotiated the terms, and executed the payment using tokenized biometric credentials. No "Buy Now" button required.

KYA: Know Your Agent

The biggest hurdle to Agentic Commerce hasn't been intelligence; it's been trust. How do you know the agent knocking on your API’s door is actually representing a human with the authority to spend? Enter the "Machine Aadhaar".

Proposed as an extension of India's population-scale digital identity, Machine Aadhaar provides a dedicated digital identity for AI agents. It allows for strictly scoped permissions—think of it like a corporate credit card for your autonomous assistant. You don't give the agent your bank password; you give it a "Trust Token" with a pre-approved limit and a specific set of merchant categories. This KYA (Know Your Agent) framework is what will turn the internet into a giant, automated bazaar.

UPI for Agents: The Financial Backbone

India is the perfect laboratory for this because of UPI. The next logical step, discussed in depth at the Summit, is a UPI-equivalent for autonomous flows. Imagine an AI agent possessing its own virtual payment address (VPA)—linked to yours, but functionally distinct. This allows for high-velocity, low-friction micro-transactions that would be impossible with traditional card-based systems.

Whether it's your car negotiating for a charging spot, or your smart home agent buying groceries based on real-time inventory, these transactions happen at the speed of silicon. The financial backbone is already here; we’re just waiting for the agents to plug in.

The Agentic OS: Sovereign & Private

For this to work at an enterprise level, we need more than just cloud APIs. We need sovereign infrastructure. Companies like KOGO, with their CommandCore™ OS, are leading the charge in "AI-in-a-box" solutions. This is an "Agentic Operating System" that runs on-premises, managing multi-agent systems without ever letting your data leak to a public cloud.

By keeping the context and the model local, enterprises can deploy agents that manage supply chains or authenticated financial trades with total data sovereignty. It’s no longer about "chatting" with a model; it's about running an autonomous operations center on your own hardware.

As I told a group of founders during the Summit's startup track: "The moat isn't the chatbot. The moat is the transaction." If your AI can’t actually act on the world, it’s just a very expensive search engine. The future belongs to those who build the agents that settle the score.