Agentic Commerce, Identity, and Global Economic Power in a Fragmenting World Order

The world economy is undergoing a profound digital transformation. At the heart of this shift it is anticipated that agentic commerce will play a central role this century. Systems in which autonomous or semi-autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents conduct economic transactions on behalf of humans, firms, or states, with minimal real-time human intervention. These agents will search markets, evaluate trade-offs, negotiate terms, execute payments, and adapt through learning. While often framed as a technological shift, agentic commerce signifies something deeper: a fundamental redefinition of economic agency, with implications not just for efficiency or markets, but for the distribution of power, the structure of economic identity, and the very meaning of participation in the global economy.

This transformation is unfolding against the backdrop of the erosion of the post-war world order; a system built on assumptions that are now under stress. After 1945, international economic and political life was anchored in human decision-making regulated through relatively stable legal, monetary, and institutional frameworks. Economic globalisation was premised on the idea that markets were mediated by human choice, and that trade, finance, and multilateral institutions would bind states together in mutual restraint. These assumptions will no longer be tenable in a world where economic decisions increasingly take place at machine speed, across jurisdictions, and guided by programming rather than people.

From Human Interfaces to Machine Mediation

Historically, commerce involved delegation. Merchants used agents, firms empowered managers, and states placed authority in institutions. What distinguishes agentic commerce is not delegation per se, but the speed, scale, and autonomy with which artificial agents operate. Unlike traditional agents, these systems do not interact through human user interfaces, do not respond to branding or persuasion, and do not rely on conscious choice. Instead, they transact with other agents through APIs, machine-readable rules, and automated financial infrastructures.

This shift erodes the traditional ‘interface economy.’ In the current digital economy, platforms like Amazon, TikTok, or Alibaba derive power from their ability to shape consumer behaviour through design, data, and psychological nudges. Collectively within the realms of ‘surveillance capitalism.’ However, agentic commerce bypasses these mechanisms entirely. An AI procurement agent selects suppliers not because of branding, user experience, or advertising influence, but because of criteria programmed into its ‘objective function’ such as price, reliability, risk exposure, or strategic alignment. As agents transact with agents, markets become machine-to-machine (M2M) environments where human-centric attributes representative of the critical arcs within ‘surveillance capitalism’ such as preference, loyalty, or sentiment lose much of their economic relevance.

Identity as Infrastructure

Critical to this transformation is the role of identity. Economic systems have always depended implicitly on identity: individuals participating in markets because they could be legally and socially recognised; firms entering contracts because they had a known legal persona; states engaging in diplomacy because they possessed a recognised sovereign identity. In agentic commerce, identity becomes explicit, programmable, and contested.

Agents must be authenticated, authorised, and trusted to transact. Digital identity therefore becomes a primary infrastructure artefact as fundamental as payment rails, settlement systems, or compliance technologies. Control over identity systems determines who an agent represents, what it is permitted to do, and where it may operate. Identity thus becomes a gateway to economic participation and a locus of power. Governments, technology platforms, and financial institutions that control identity standards whether through public digital ID schemes, private identity platforms, or sovereign credential systems effectively determine which agents can operate where, under whose authority, and with which rights.

This reconfiguration of identity challenges older assumptions about personal, corporate, and national economic agency. Individuals may no longer be primary actors; instead, they are principals whose intentions are delegated into algorithmic proxies. Firms become constituencies of agentic behaviour, through which decision-making power shifts from human strategists to algorithmic policy constraints. States, too, compete over how identities are encoded, whether through national identity frameworks, cross-border digital credentials, or global standards, each with implications for sovereignty and control.

Identity is thus both economic and political. It determines access to capital, to markets, and to regulatory recognition. It defines who can participate in financial systems and under what conditions. In a world of agentic commerce, economic identity becomes a central point of stratification and contestation.

The Geopolitics of Agentic Systems

The transformation described above occurs within a rapidly shifting geopolitical environment. The post-war world assumed that economic interdependence would be pacifying: ‘trade kills war,’ goes the maxim. Yet recent decades have seen economic networks weaponised. Extraterritorial sanctions, export controls, investment restrictions, and financial exclusions have become routine instruments of geo-economics and statecraft. Agentic commerce accelerates and embeds this weaponisation directly into economic decision-making.

An autonomous agent can be programmed to avoid certain jurisdictions, automatically comply with sanctions lists, prioritise politically aligned suppliers, optimise for regulatory compatibility, and shift exposure dynamically in response to geopolitical events.

Economic behaviour ceases to be neutral and becomes strategically aligned with a policy maker’s priorities, diminishing the separation between markets and geopolitics.

In an emerging multipolar world, this programmability will likely exacerbate fragmentation. Rather than a single, integrated global market governed by shared rules and institutions, agentic commerce is likely to operate across overlapping but incompatible ecosystems. Agents aligned with Western legal and financial systems may use dollar-based payment rails, Western digital identity standards, and compliance frameworks rooted in liberal norms. Agents aligned with Chinese, BRICS+, or other regional coalitions may operate within alternative infrastructures, digital currency environments, and regulatory priorities.

Efforts to build parallel systems such as digital currency arrangements, alternative payment messaging networks, or sovereign identity frameworks are not simply responses to sanctions pressure or financial exclusion. They reflect emerging sovereign agentic environments designed to facilitate economic activity independently of any single hegemonic system. Once agents are embedded within these distinct infrastructures, the costs of switching between systems will rise and interoperability will diminish, thus reinforcing fragmentation.

Supranational Institutions Under Strain

Compounding these dynamics is the weakening of traditional supranational institutions. After the Second World War, organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, and the United Nations provided fora for coordination, dispute resolution, and shared rulemaking. These orgnisations’ legitimacy depends on the perception that they can operate above great-power rivalry and enforce norms impartially.

Today, that perception is under strain. As economic power diffuses and enforcement becomes selective, the universal authority of these institutions is contested. Agentic commerce exacerbates this problem by enabling economic activity at speeds that outpace institutional responsiveness. Disputes may emerge from interactions among autonomous agents rather than clear human decisions, complicating legal attribution and accountability. Traditional legal concepts such as consent, intent, and liability are strained when actions are the emergent output of highly distributed, learning systems operating across borders. The result resembles a governance gap, whereby institutional structures are unable to maintain pace with the realities of economic interaction.

Legal and Regulatory Challenges

Agentic commerce poses profound challenges for existing legal frameworks. Contract law assumes parties with identifiable legal personalities entering into agreements through discernible acts of mutual consent. Consumer protection regimes presume human vulnerability to imbalance of information or deception. Competition law predicates on the assumption that collusion requires communication or agreement among discrete entities.

In a world of agentic systems:

• An agent may enter into a contract without a clear moment of human authorisation.

• Algorithmic optimisation may converge on pricing or behaviour that resembles collusion without explicit human coordination.

• Trade-offs may be made that reflect algorithmic priorities rather than the nuanced ethical preferences of privacy-bound principals.

These developments strain the conceptual foundations of existing legal systems and complicate enforcement, especially across jurisdictions with divergent regulatory regimes.

Governance, Power, and Fragmentation

Beneath law and regulation lies a deeper political question, ‘who governs economic agency in an agentic world?’ As human decision-making is delegated to machines, control shifts toward those who design, deploy, and regulate the underlying systems. Large technology firms (Big Tech), global financial institutions, and powerful states are uniquely positioned to build and control the ‘agent stack’ which comprises the combination of AI models, data, identity frameworks, financial systems, and payment infrastructure that enables autonomous commerce.

For smaller firms or individuals, this poses a risk of dependency whereby economic participation becomes mediated by intermediaries whose priorities are not aligned with end users or diffuse principals. This is not simply a matter of market dominance; it is a shift in the architecture of economic agency itself. Decisions become opaque, outcomes harder to contest, and responsibility diffuse, a trend that complicates democratic accountability and regulatory oversight.

These risks are intensified by the simultaneous erosion of the post-war order. That order depended on a balance between power and legitimacy whereby rules constrain the powerful because they are broadly accepted, and enforcement has credibility because it is consistent. Systematically, that balance is weakening. Agentic commerce is likely to accelerate the reconfiguration of supply chains, financial flows, and contractual relationships, thereby enabling rapid adaptation to political shocks while also making shared systems easier to exit than to reform. Fragmentation becomes rational for individual actors even when it undermines collective stability.

Opportunities and Governance Imperatives

It would be a mistake, however, to regard agentic commerce as inherently dystopian. Autonomous systems have the potential to reduce transaction costs, improve resilience, and enable more efficient resource allocation. In contexts such as logistics optimisation, energy grid management, or disaster relief coordination, agentic systems may outperform human-centred alternatives.

The central challenge lies in governance. Without deliberate institutional design, agentic commerce risks entrenching inequality, amplifying geopolitical rivalry, and undermining democratic legitimacy. Properly constrained and regulated, it could instead support a more adaptive and resilient economic order, particularly one which is capable of reconciling dynamic market behaviour with equitable participation and shared norms.

Crucially, this requires rethinking fundamental assumptions about sovereignty, jurisdiction, and responsibility. Identity, in particular, must be understood not as an incidental technical layer but as a core domain of power in agentic commerce. Nations, institutions, and firms must negotiate not only regulatory interoperability but also common standards of identity, accountability, and authority if they intend to maintain coherence in global economic interaction.

Conclusion

Agentic commerce represents a qualitative shift in economic organisation. By decoupling agency from human cognition and embedding it in autonomous systems, it transforms markets, reshapes identity, and redistributes power across states and institutions. In the context of a fragmenting post-war order, this shift accelerates economic and political fragmentation while exposing the limitations of existing governance structures.

Whether agentic commerce becomes a force for efficiency and collective resilience or a driver of instability and domination will depend on how identity, infrastructure, and authority are governed. What is clear is that economic agency and the meaning of economic participation itself is being fundamentally redefined. In this new epoch, the politics of identity, the architecture of autonomy, and the governance of infrastructure will matter as much as if not more than the markets they serve.

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