Amazon and Visa Named Agentic Commerce Their Next Growth Engine. Agent Identity Has to Exist First.

On Wednesday’s Q1 earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy identified agentic commerce as the next major interface between consumers and retail. Rufus, Amazon's AI shopping assistant, now counts 115% more monthly active users and 400% higher engagement than a year ago. Rufus is one example of the growing agentic ecosystem for e-commerce platforms as an agent on the retailer's side, helping customers navigate Amazon's catalog. 

The larger wave Jassy is pointing to is consumers and businesses deploying their own agents to shop, compare, and transact across any platform, without any manual input. Visa made the same prediction on its earnings call the day before, naming agentic commerce its next growth engine. As agent technology matures and becomes more accessible for a broader range of users, automating online transactions will become commonplace. 

Before we reach that stage, however, we’ll need a secure, scalable identity layer for our agents and ourselves. If an agent cannot verify that its owner is above a minimum age, not a resident of an OFAC-sanctioned region, or other key details that are typically required in online transactions, then agent commerce will be severely limited. 

This is exactly why Self Agent ID exists: users can privately verify their unique humanity and identity, then easily delegate those credentials to their agent. Now, an agent can attest that it belongs to a real person and that the real person does, in fact, meet all criteria for a given transaction. 

When a user scans their passport in the Self app, their agent receives a verified identity linked back to them. The credentials the agent carries are the owner's to define: proof of humanity, age, nationality, sanctions status, or any combination a given platform requires. Any service the agent interacts with can verify those credentials without friction. Because each passport ties to exactly one agent, the system is structurally closed to the kind of bot-farm manipulation that makes current agent ecosystems easy to game. 

Self is built for the agentic web, with privacy-first solutions used by Google, Opera, and over 15 million users. The version of agentic commerce that Amazon and Visa are describing requires verified identity. Self Agent ID is where that starts.

Learn more about Self Agent ID: https://app.ai.self.xyz/