Agentic Commerce and Subscriptions – Why You Should Build Now and What It Means for Your Business
AI is starting to shop on behalf of humans — and faster than most businesses expect. The emerging PSD3 mandate model is structurally identical to a subscription. Companies that build recurring-revenue infrastructure today will be ready for agentic commerce without having to rebuild from scratch.
This post is a bit more technical than usual — but I believe it's strategically important for us and for our customers. Worth reading to the end.
When AI starts buying things for us — what that means for subscriptions
E-commerce is evolving faster than most businesses have had time to digest the last shift. For years we've all been accustomed to the customer deciding, clicking, and paying themselves. Now a new scenario is emerging — the customer delegates those decisions to AI.
It's called agentic commerce. And it isn't some distant future. According to the Adyen Index 2025, the number of people using AI for shopping grew by 47% in a single year. In Poland, during last year's Black Friday, 27% of shoppers used AI to support their purchasing decisions — more than in the UK.
Before AI can independently finalize transactions, however, it needs a mandate. And that mandate is the most interesting piece of the entire puzzle.
A mandate instead of clicking "pay"
Krzysztof Goworek of Quintant.ai put it well: requiring the user to confirm every transaction kills the whole idea of agentic payments. If AI has to ask your permission for every purchase, what's the point of AI?
The emerging standard under PSD3/PSR points in a different direction — delegated authentication. The user goes through verification once to grant a scoped mandate. Something like: "you may spend up to €100 per week on digital subscriptions with trusted providers." From there, the agent acts autonomously within those limits.
Sound familiar? That's because it's structurally identical to a subscription with a pre-defined cap and category. The mandate model that PSD3 is formalising as infrastructure is recurring subscription in a new guise — except that instead of the customer authorising the payment, an agent acting on their behalf does it.
What this means for companies already building subscriptions today
Here's something worth saying plainly. Companies that are implementing subscription models today — publishers, e-learning platforms, fitness apps — are building on exactly the infrastructure that will power agentic commerce in a few years' time.
Not because AI is their main customer. But because the architecture is the same. A standing mandate, a defined scope, automated billing, a full audit trail for every transaction. When a customer one day tells their agent "pay my subscriptions," the platform already managing those subscriptions will be ready.
Zevio is built for this model. Not because we planned for agentic commerce from the start — but because good subscription architecture and AI-ready architecture are, to a large extent, the same thing. Complete transaction logs, retry logic, mandate management, subscriber history. This isn't a nice-to-have. In light of the AI Act and PSD3, it's becoming a compliance requirement.
One risk worth knowing about
Goworek gave an example that sticks with you. The agent stays within budget but instead of ordering an "iPhone 16" it orders "16 kg of apples" — because both fit the mandate's parameters. Who is liable?
Right now, that answer isn't clear-cut. The AI Act distributes responsibility between the technology provider and the deploying entity — the bank, the merchant, the platform. That means every platform handling agentic payments will need to prove that its logs are complete, that any retry was justified, and that each transaction can be traced back to a specific decision.
That's another argument for building subscriptions on solid infrastructure now — before regulators start asking for the details.
Where things stand
BLIK has joined the European mobile payments interoperability network. PSD3 is formalising the mandate model. The AI Act is introducing audit-trail requirements for agentic payments. Three apparently independent vectors — all pointing to the same place.
Companies that build subscription models on solid infrastructure today won't need to rebuild anything when AI becomes a full participant in transactions. They'll simply be ready sooner.
And that's exactly why it's worth starting now.
While writing this post I drew on an article that inspired me — you can find it on the XYZ portal here. Recommended reading.