For original article click here.
Firmly has launched a platform designed to make it easier for merchants to adopt agentic commerce.
The new Buy Now platform standardizes the emerging protocols for agentic AI commerce and enables merchants to make their products shoppable across all digital platforms, with no engineering effort required, the company said in a Wednesday (Nov. 5) press release emailed to PYMNTS.
The platform provides a secure, standardized interface that solves the complexity around the many protocols, evolving standards and fragmented integrations, firmly Chief Revenue Officer Scott Hendrickson said in the release.
“AI agents and humans are ready to transact within digital platforms, and firmly ensures that they can do so safely and seamlessly at scale — with any merchant,” Hendrickson said. “We’ve built the pipes for the next wave of commerce, unlocking effortless transactions and scalable growth for both merchants and digital platforms.”
The platform delivers relevant data in an AI-readable format, provides support for all standards and generates verifiable human authorization proofs for orders, according to the release.
It also reduces fraud by scoring and monitoring agent behavior across merchants, enables merchants to approve or restrict agent and platform access, and helps digital platforms surface the right products, per the release.
“Firmly abstracts the complexity, providing a trusted foundation for safe, scalable agentic commerce — so merchants can focus on growing their business, not managing integrations,” firmly Co-founder and CEO Kumar Senthil said in the release.
Firmly is one of 11 startups selected in September by Mastercard for the latest cohort of its Start Path Emerging Fintech program. Mastercard said that when picking these startups during a competitive global selection process, it looked for unique expertise in high-growth sectors.
The company noted that firmly offers an agentic AI platform that allows customers to purchase at any digital touchpoint.
Mastercard also said in September that firmly is one of the agentic commerce providers and enablers with which it has partnered.
Merchants’ incremental experiments with agentic commerce today will pay off when agentic experiences hit the mainstream, Hendrickson told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview posted in May.
“Merchants have to lean in,” Hendrickson said. “This world is evolving quickly, and we can test — and, most important, learn — without a lot of cost. Those who adopt early will see the benefits, just as they did in the early days of social commerce.”
