Ep. 8: What Is Agentic Commerce? Cindy Turner of Worldpay Explains the Impact on Merchants and Payments
EPISODE GUESTS
Lucinda “Cindy” Turner is Chief Product Officer at Global Payments, specialising in global payments, product innovation and growth strategy.
She has extensive leadership experience across payments and fintech, including senior roles at Worldpay and PayPal. Her wider background includes experience at Visa, J.P. Morgan and KKR, where her involvement in the acquisition of First Data first introduced her to the payments value chain.
Cindy currently focuses on the development of payment products and infrastructure that help merchants respond to changing consumer behaviour, including the growth of AI-led and agentic commerce.
SHOW NOTES
Key Topics Discussed:
What agentic commerce means for consumers, merchants and payment providers
How AI shopping agents could move product discovery away from merchant websites
The role of stored cards, payment vaults and agentic checkout
Why headless commerce creates commercial risks for retailers
How agent-led purchases could affect returns, liability and chargebacks
What the Worldpay and OpenAI partnership means for merchants
Why merchants need a voice in emerging agentic commerce protocols
How prepared major retailers are for AI-driven payments
Episode Summary:
This episode gets into agentic commerce, and why it matters for merchants, retailers and payment providers. Cindy Turner, Chief Product Officer at Global Payments, joins Justin Hanna to discuss AI shopping agents, headless commerce, payment infrastructure and Worldpay’s work with OpenAI.
The conversation looks at a difficult commercial tension. AI agents could make shopping faster and easier for consumers, but they may also remove merchants from the moment of discovery, reduce control of the customer relationship and create new questions around returns, liability and chargebacks.
What is agentic commerce?
Agentic commerce is a form of shopping in which an AI agent helps a consumer discover, select or purchase a product.
The process can take several forms. At the simplest level, an AI platform might recommend a product and direct the customer to the merchant through a link. A more advanced agent could use stored payment credentials to complete a guest checkout or carry out a software-to-software transaction on the customer’s behalf.
Cindy explains that the industry is still early in this development. Many current examples rely on marketplaces, payment links or headless checkout experiences rather than fully autonomous purchasing.
The direction of travel is still clear. Product discovery is beginning to move into large language models and AI interfaces, while payment providers, card networks, technology platforms and merchants work out how the resulting transactions should operate.
Why does agentic commerce matter to merchants?
For merchants, the immediate issue is control. Retailers have traditionally relied on their own websites, apps and stores to present inventory, communicate their brand and build customer loyalty. These environments also allow them to cross-sell products, collect customer insight and encourage repeat purchases.
When an AI agent controls discovery and selection, much of that relationship could move outside the merchant’s own channels. That creates a serious commercial risk. If consumers begin shopping through AI platforms rather than search engines, retail apps or merchant websites, businesses may have to participate simply to protect their revenue. At the same time, participation could leave them with less influence over how their products are presented and less direct contact with the buyer.
This is why headless commerce can be uncomfortable for merchants. The transaction may still reach the retailer, but the merchant no longer owns the whole journey.
How could agentic payments work?
An agentic payment requires a way for the AI agent to access an approved payment method and pass the transaction to the merchant.
That could involve a card stored in a payment vault, an agent completing a merchant’s guest checkout, or a platform sending a payment link to the consumer. In more advanced cases, it could involve a direct software-to-software transaction.
Each approach creates practical questions. Merchants and payment providers need to establish how customer permission is captured, which party controls the credentials and who is responsible when the agent makes a poor decision.
The technology is only one part of the problem. The industry also needs workable commercial rules.
What happens when an AI agent makes the wrong purchase?
Returns and liability are among the biggest unresolved issues.
An agent might technically follow a customer’s request but still make a choice the customer would never have accepted. It could book the cheapest flight but select an unwanted overnight journey, for example. It could also buy the correct shoe in the right size and colour, but from a seller that does not allow returns.
Those details affect whether the customer considers the purchase successful. When an agent sits between the consumer and merchant, the returns process can also become harder to manage. The merchant may not know what the agent promised, how the item was selected or which information was shown to the customer.
Cindy expects these grey areas to become increasingly important as agentic transactions lead to disputes and chargebacks. Payment providers will need to help define where responsibility sits when the consumer, agent, merchant and AI platform all play a role.
What does the Worldpay and OpenAI partnership mean?
Worldpay’s stated role is to represent the merchant perspective as agentic commerce develops.
Technology companies, card networks and payment businesses are introducing different protocols and models for AI-led transactions. Rather than backing only one route, Worldpay is working with platforms including OpenAI and Google, as well as payment networks, to help ensure merchant requirements are built into those systems.
That includes questions around returns, transaction liability and how purchases are passed to the retailer. Worldpay can also bring large merchants into controlled environments where new agentic commerce use cases can be tested. Cindy says the aim is to help the industry develop protocols that work in real merchant situations, rather than designing them around an ideal checkout journey.
Are merchants ready for agentic commerce?
The episode suggests awareness is running ahead of adoption. At a Worldpay client event attended by 250 businesses representing around a trillion dollars in payment volume, more than 80% reportedly rated agentic commerce as highly disruptive. However, only four attendees had tried an agentic transaction, while roughly 30% said their business had launched a related strategic initiative.
That gap captures the current market. Payments and retail leaders expect a substantial shift, but most businesses are still experimenting or deciding what they need to do.
For merchants, the sensible next step is to understand where AI agents could enter the customer journey, which parts of the merchant experience must remain protected and how returns, customer service and liability would work in practice.
Frequently asked questions
What does agentic commerce mean?
Agentic commerce means using an AI agent to support or carry out parts of a shopping journey. This may include finding a product, comparing options, selecting an item or completing a payment on the consumer’s behalf.
How does agentic commerce work?
An AI agent interprets what the consumer wants, identifies a suitable product and connects the customer or their stored payment credentials with the merchant. The transaction may use a link, guest checkout, marketplace model or direct software integration.
How could AI agents affect ecommerce merchants?
AI agents could create new sales channels and make buying easier, but they could also reduce merchant control over product discovery, branding, cross-selling and customer relationships.
What are the main risks of agentic commerce?
The risks discussed in the episode include loss of merchant control, unclear returns processes, poor purchasing decisions by agents, liability disputes and an increase in chargebacks.
The big takeaway: agentic commerce could change who controls product discovery, checkout and the customer relationship. For merchants, PSPs and platforms, that means preparing the commercial rules alongside the technology. Get that right, and AI agents could open a valuable new route to market. Get it wrong, and merchants could lose customer control while inheriting the cost of returns, disputes and chargebacks.
MEET THE HOSTS
Co-Host and Co-Founder of The Payments Shed Podcast
Grant Evans
Grant Evans is a leading voice in the fintech industry and the creator of the widely followed ‘The Payments Shed Newsletter’. With more than 15 years experience shaping commercial strategy and driving partnership growth, he is recognised for turning complex topics such as embedded payments, BNPL, unified commerce, and open banking into clear, actionable insights that resonate with global audiences. Named a LinkedIn Top Voice in both 2024 and 2025, Grant has built a community of over 27,000 engaged professionals, merchants, and innovators who look to him for commentary on the trends redefining global commerce. A sought-after speaker and panelist, his thought leadership is regularly featured in financial services publications and at flagship industry events including Money 20/20, FTT Fintech and the Global RegTech Summit.
Co-Host and Co-Founder of The Payments Shed Podcast
Justin Hanna
Justin Hanna was recently named the #1 Head of Sales Top Voice by the National Sales Conference for good reason: he’s redefining what sales leadership looks like in the modern era. With deep B2B sales experience and a people-first approach, Justin earns trust through insight and practical strategy, not tired tactics. A respected voice in payments, he’s also built a 22,000-strong LinkedIn following by making complex topics relatable and actionable. His influence has been recognised widely: a LinkedIn Top Payment Systems Voice (2024), one of the top 30 voices shaping the future of payments, banking, and fintech (2025), and celebrated by the National Sales Conference as the #1 Head of Sales Top Voice. Known for challenging the status quo, Justin’s unfiltered take on leadership, culture, and growth resonates because it’s honest, and his ability to lead with both expertise and empathy has made him one of the most influential sales voices today.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
So, welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast. Today we have Cindy Turner, CPA from Worldpay. Cindy, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, Justin.
Give us an introduction on yourself. Tell us a little bit more.
Well, thank you, Justin. I really appreciate it. I enjoy these, and it’s nice to drop something like this into a busy day at Money20/20.
I have been with Worldpay for about a year and a half. I joined last April. My fun fact would be that my one-year anniversary was actually the day that the Global acquisition was announced.
So, it was a wild first year. But I’ve been in the merchant side of payments for a really long time.
I got into it kind of accidentally. I was at KKR when we bought First Data, and that was where I found payments. I found the value chain really interesting and the space really interesting.
I spent a little bit of time at Visa, quite a long time at J.P. Morgan running product there, and then, right before this, I had the opportunity to run Braintree for a couple of years.
So, I’m deeply a payments geek at this point.
That’s what we like to hear on the show.
So, Cindy, tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on agentic commerce. It’s a buzzword in the industry right now, but people are really starting to bring this to life. What does that mean to you?
Yeah, absolutely. Agentic is a very wide umbrella, but broadly I think the entire trend is that the consumer themselves is moving their moment of discovery into an LLM.
Then there is the ability for agent operators, whether that’s the LLM itself or third-party start-ups building within those environments, to create shopping that is a friction-free, beautiful consumer experience of, “How about I go buy that thing for you?”
What’s engaged in that? You need the consumer to have stored a card in some kind of vault, and then you need to move that transaction through to the merchant.
There are a lot of ways that can happen. That can happen with an agent shopping through guest checkout. It can happen, at its very simplest, through a link getting pushed to the consumer within a ChatGPT-type interface.
Or it can happen by storing that card and completing a software-to-software-based transaction.
We’re not there yet in terms of software-to-software-based transactions. We have a lot of instances of either the marketplace model, where some kind of agent operator is creating a marketplace of goods, or shopping through guest checkout and headless commerce.
But we’re still early in the experimentation.
I love the term headless commerce. I think there are more and more businesses now approaching that idea that we don’t need to be sitting at the front of the consumer, but if needed, we can.
What is Worldpay’s role within this ecosystem?
It’s funny. I think headless commerce is really scary to merchants.
The reason merchants are in business is because they believe they have brand loyalty, and they believe they are better at presenting a selection of inventory to the consumer than any of their competitors.
This is a scary moment for a retailer that operates typically on fairly thin margins.
If that moment of discovery and the inventory management move into the LLM, and they lose the ability to have a consumer on their website, they can’t cross-sell and they can’t build brand loyalty.
They even lose some of the connectivity to market incremental transactions back to the consumer.
They may also have really bad, long-tail, non-happy paths. If you need to make a return and Perplexity bought your sweater for you, Macy’s doesn’t even know that Perplexity sold that sweater.
I think headless commerce is actually quite a scary moment for many merchants.
We’ve talked about the challenges there. What are the benefits to merchants? Of course, we have the seamless customer and consumer journey, but what else do you think can really benefit a merchant?
If the consumer’s eyeballs move away from Google for discovery, or away from going straight to the merchant themselves through their app or native surface, then their revenue is at stake.
If they want to continue to sell, they have to move into that environment. But it’s a major transition for where we are in commerce right now.
I think the consumer mindset has changed significantly when buying things in retail. They want to be able to order it today and have it arrive tomorrow.
That Amazon Prime mindset is what everyone is now looking for when they’re buying things.
Talk to me a little bit more about the Worldpay and OpenAI partnership. Firstly, congratulations on that. It’s huge news. Tell us a little bit more about what it means.
The funny thing in agentic commerce is that there have been about six announcements in the last two months.
We have A2A, we have ACP, and Visa has its Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative. Every major player is trying to release its own protocol for what it believes agentic commerce will become.
Worldpay is a little bit different. We’re saying, let us sit there representing the merchant and bring the merchant’s perspective into each of those relationships.
Whether it’s Google, OpenAI or Visa, we’re able to be a partner to merchants, or a partner to the LLM and platform trying to own the consumer, and help influence them.
We need to make sure they’re thinking about things like returns. How is the return of this transaction going to work? How are we going to navigate liability?
If the agent makes a purchase that isn’t exactly what the consumer would have bought, sometimes the SKU is technically the right thing, but it isn’t what the consumer would actually have chosen.
You can think about that in any industry.
In a travel transaction, the consumer might say, “Yes, I wanted you to buy the cheapest ticket from San Francisco to New York, but I never would have taken a red-eye. Why would you have bought me a red-eye?”
Or they might say, “Yes, I wanted you to buy that exact Nike shoe in black and in my size, but why would you have bought it without a return policy? I never would have made that purchase if I couldn’t make a return.”
All the nuances of what specifically gets purchased are going to be disruptive as we start to see chargebacks on those transactions.
Worldpay’s role in the ecosystem is to be a launch partner, create innovation and stand up use cases.
We represent eight of the ten largest merchants globally, so we can bring those merchants into a sandbox-based environment and start to light up some use cases.
But we can also influence how LLMs and other parties think about building protocols in a way that works for merchants.
That’s really what we announced with OpenAI.
I think it’s really interesting that you mentioned that Worldpay provides services to eight of the ten largest retailers.
What’s good is that you’re bringing retailers into the conversation and really understanding how this is going to work.
We don’t know how it works. Nobody has gone through this process before. Working with merchants is absolutely key, which is great.
My favourite fun fact comes from Worldpay’s Rethink conference, which is our client event.
We held our European event in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago, and we had 250 clients in the audience. Collectively, they represented a trillion dollars in payment volume.
So, a trillion dollars of the global economy was sitting in a room with us.
We asked a couple of questions using QR codes.
The first question was, “How disruptive do you think agentic commerce is going to be for your business?”
More than 80% of people rated it a nine or ten.
They were saying, “This is the most important moment in my career. The consumer is moving. It’s going to be incredibly disruptive. The big players are going to be different three years from now. I’m terrified of what it’s going to look like.”
The second question was, “Have you tried an agentic transaction yet?”
Four people out of 250 payments nerds had tried an agentic transaction.
These are people who run payments at major retailers and care enough about payments to show up at our client event. Only four had tried one.
The third question was, “Is your company already launching a strategic initiative around what agentic commerce should look like?”
Only around 30% said yes.
To me, that is very representative of where we are.
People are terrified. They see the change and believe it is going to transform everything, but no one has tried it yet and the biggest merchants are not really working on it.
I think that’s very representative of where we are today.
Fantastic. Thank you.
Tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on Money20/20 so far. How is it going for Worldpay?
I love and hate Money20/20.
It’s so efficient. I can meet with 30 to 40 people in 48 hours. It’s exhausting.
I think I already told you that I wore shoes that are brand new, and I’m regretting that choice. I’m only a couple of hours in.
But the energy is great. It’s such an efficient way to be here with our clients, vendors and partners, and to get so much done in just a few days.
Fantastic.
Lastly, the Shelf of Shame. Cindy, what is one thing in payments or fintech that really gets to you and grinds your gears?
You asked earlier, “What does agentic mean to you?”
I think that two years ago, if we had this conversation, the question would have been, “What does orchestration mean to you?”
People land on a word, and the entire conference or industry starts talking about that word, but everyone has their own definition.
With orchestration, when you’re talking to engineers, they’re talking about internal orchestration.
When you’re talking within payments, everyone uses orchestration to mean a vault that is able to provide a forward API.
Everybody lands on a very specific word, but then allows themselves to have a different definition from everybody else.
It makes it really hard to converse about some of these topics.
I think that’s a really, really good point.
Perfect. Thank you so much for your time, Cindy. Enjoy the rest of the show.
Great. Thank you.
Join the podcast for a relaxed conversation where you can share your experience and perspective with people working across the payments industry.
Be a Guest on the Podcast
Sponsor the podcast and get your brand featured in front of the top players in the Payments and fintech industry.