American Express Is Telling Merchants How to Prepare for Agent Shopping — and Offering to Pay When It Goes Wrong

Shelly Palmer: Who pays when the agent goes rogue

Think About This: An agent has no bank account and no insurance policy.

American Express Is Telling Merchants How to Prepare for Agent Shopping — and Offering to Pay When It Goes Wrong

American Express is finally acknowledging the elephant in the room: you cannot build a commerce network on top of autonomous agents if nobody trusts the agents to actually pay for anything. On October 6, 2026, the company released its Amex Business Playbook for Agentic Commerce, a document that effectively admits that their earlier technical work […]