Morph's Agentic Economy Report: $500B in AI Commerce by 2028

Morph's central claim is that AI is moving past content generation into direct economic participation. Agents are beginning to discover products, compare offers, negotiate shipping and returns, authorize payments, and complete purchases without a human clicking through every step.

The last twelve months made that concrete. Stripe and OpenAI launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol behind Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, with over a million Shopify merchants set to follow. shipped the Agent Payments Protocol with more than 60 partners and stablecoin settlement through x402. Shopify introduced its so agents can transact with any merchant, and Visa and Mastercard both released agent-payment frameworks.

The report stacks several independent data points, which is why enterprises are investing now rather than waiting. Salesforce reported that AI and agents influenced 20% of global orders during Cyber Week 2025 — around $67 billion of a record $336.6 billion in spend.

Discovery is moving too. recorded a 693% year-over-year rise in generative-AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites over the 2025 holiday season. estimates agentic commerce could reach up to $1 trillion in U.S. retail and $3 to $5 trillion globally by 2030. of $500 billion in agent-influenced volume by 2028 sits inside that range, alongside predictions that agents will overtake humans in commercial stablecoin payments and that one in ten U.S. households will regularly let agents complete purchases by 2028.

Agent commerce only works when machines can transact safely, so a large part of Morph's report is infrastructure. It breaks the emerging stack into four layers.

Identity — can this agent be trusted and held accountable? Mandate — has a human authorized this specific transaction? Checkout — can the agent settle price, shipping, tax, and returns? Settlement — how does money actually move?

Morph gives stablecoins significant attention as the native settlement layer for agent-driven commerce, and the argument is economic. Traditional card rails carry fixed processing costs that make sub-dollar transactions uneconomical, while the tiny, high-frequency payments agents make between one another settle naturally on stablecoin rails. Google's AP2 launch shipped exactly this: an x402 extension for agent-based crypto payments, built with Coinbase and the Ethereum Foundation.

Excitement and real economic activity are not the same thing yet, and Morph is explicit about it. An a16z analysis examined the widely-quoted "$24 million of x402 volume in 30 days" figure Bloomberg reported and found that, once wash trades are filtered out, genuine payment volume was closer to $1.6 million. Most current activity is testing and synthetic transactions rather than mature commercial demand.

Morph's ten predictions for 2028 range from the plausible to the disruptive — autonomous agents driving price declines above 10% in comparable categories, a Fortune 100 breach attributed to an AI agent, and major retailers reorganizing around agent readiness. Whether or not every forecast lands, the direction is clear: businesses will optimize for machine buyers alongside human ones.

Preparation starts with product data. Agents evaluate titles, attributes, pricing, availability, reviews, and policy signals programmatically, so an incomplete or inconsistent catalog loses comparisons before a human ever sees it. Checkout and protocol readiness come next: if an agent cannot complete a transaction through your stack, discovery is wasted. For the structured-data groundwork, our covers the exact fields to prioritize.