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The path of history is littered with technology that looked like the future. The pocket computer, complete with stylus input and rudimentary apps, became a must-have for executives, selling millions of units within months of launch.
Agentic commerce will reshape payments
But its triumph was short-lived. First BlackBerry, then the iPhone, consigned it to history. What looked like a destination was in fact a stepping stone towards something bigger.
Digital wallets may prove to be one such payment technology. They changed the way consumers transacted online by eliminating friction at checkout and making e-commerce feel safer.
Yet, just as the Palm Pilot was a waypoint on the road to the smartphone, wallets may soon be overshadowed by a more profound shift: the rise of agentic commerce and so-called “Zero Checkout”.
The Wallet’s Waning Role
When PayPal launched in 1998, its breakthrough was to speed settlement between buyers and sellers on eBay. No more waiting for payments to clear before goods shipped.
In the decades that followed, wallets became the “buy button” that reassured wary consumers and helped merchants convert browsers into paying customers.
But nearly three decades on, wallets remain a minority choice. Despite Apple Pay’s fanfare in 2014 and countless imitators, their usage is limited.
According to PYMNTS Intelligence, only 9.6% of consumers used a wallet for an online payment in May 2025. Debit and credit cards remain far more common, with Amazon’s closed-loop stored credentials accounting for a large share of wallet-like payments.
The result is a paradox: almost every smartphone has a wallet installed, almost every merchant terminal can accept one, yet adoption lags.
Wallets thrived in an era when checkout pages dominated online commerce. If checkout itself disappears, their reason for being disappears with it.
Enter the Agent
The new paradigm is agentic commerce. Instead of filling in forms or pressing “buy now”, consumers will issue instructions to AI agents.
These agents will interpret prompts, gather product options, weigh trade-offs and execute orders.
The consumer sets parameters – price range, delivery window, loyalty preferences, financing terms – and the agent orchestrates the transaction.
The point of decision shifts from where to pay at checkout, to how to pay in the background. “One-Click” becomes “Zero-Click”. Consumers do not scroll through payment choices; their agent applies credentials intelligently, optimising rewards, cash flow or instalments without intervention.
Why Tokens Trump Wallets
The critical infrastructure for this world is not the wallet but the credential. Over the last decade Visa, Mastercard and banks have built vast tokenisation systems.
Tokens replace card numbers with dynamic, updatable credentials, embedding themselves into subscriptions, recurring payments and merchant ecosystems.
Visa alone has issued 13.7 billion tokens, covering nearly half of global e-commerce transactions.
These tokenised accounts can carry far more than payment authority. They can convey identity attributes – age, business status, delivery preferences – in privacy-preserving ways.
This increases merchant trust and smooths acceptance. In effect, the credential becomes “smart”, able to present the optimal option for each transaction.
This evolution positions networks and issuers with a structural advantage. They control the infrastructure that agents will tap into when executing payments at scale.
Platforms Race to Catch Up
That has not stopped platforms from experimenting. Google and PayPal recently announced a multiyear partnership, pledging to “revolutionise” agent-driven shopping.
PayPal’s systems will be embedded into Google’s ecosystem, while Google Cloud will provide the AI backbone. Similar alliances abound: OpenAI with Shopify, Perplexity with PayPal.
Yet the logic is questionable.
PayPal’s hundreds of millions of accounts matter less in a world where consumers do not begin shopping on payment sites. What matters is ownership of the intent signal – where the journey starts.
Google has billions of daily queries, but it must defend that position as generative AI platforms emerge. PayPal, meanwhile, risks looking like yesterday’s intermediary, clinging to a wallet model that agents may bypass.
Disruption is Moving Faster
The disruption is moving faster than the digital wallet ever did. Wallets spent nearly thirty years trying to scale.
AI agents could reach critical mass in less than a decade, propelled by consumers’ appetite for conversational shopping and seamless payment.
The future of payments may not be a faster button or slicker wallet. It could be no button at all: Zero Checkout, powered by intelligent credentials, with agents making optimal decisions invisibly.
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