Analysis
Agentic commerce has moved beyond phone screens into smart TVs, lock screens, and streaming devices. Merchants who thought this was a web problem are now exposed on surfaces they never planned for.
The Ambient Checkout Frontier
The transition of agentic commerce from the controlled environment of a smartphone screen to the ambient surfaces of the home and pocket is now underway. On October 15, 2026, PayPal and Glance announced an integration that embeds native checkout directly into the Glance ecosystem. Commerce is now a background process triggered by AI agents on smart TVs, lock screens, and connected TV (CTV) interfaces, rather than a destination a user visits.
Scale and Surface Area
Glance, owned by InMobi, reports its software is embedded across more than 60 million mobile and CTV devices. This vendor-reported footprint includes Samsung Galaxy devices via the Galaxy Store, Motorola lock screens, DirecTV Gemini, and various Android TV platforms. By integrating PayPal as the exclusive native checkout partner, the companies aim to capture consumer attention at the moment of inspiration, before a search query is even initiated. For Samsung users, this reach expanded significantly in June 2026, when the partnership brought agentic commerce to all 2020 and newer smart TVs in the United States.
Infrastructure for AI Transactions
To manage this distribution, PayPal utilizes paypal.ai as the primary merchant-side infrastructure. The platform offers a single integration point designed to connect merchants to multiple AI shopping surfaces, providing real-time product data and facilitating in-flow transactions. Glance complements this with AI-powered features such as virtual try-on and product discovery. However, the velocity of this deployment-reaching 60 million devices-appears to be outpacing the development of the underlying trust infrastructure required to secure these transactions.
The Liability Wall Expands
Previous coverage has highlighted a growing liability wall, and the expansion into ambient surfaces complicates this dynamic. Merchants are now facing potential exposure on device surfaces they never explicitly planned for or vetted. Data from PYMNTS and Visa indicates that 93% of merchants believe the AI provider should bear the financial loss for incorrect purchases. Despite this, only 28% of merchants are currently willing to expose their full inventory to agents, and only 11% of SMBs are considered agent-ready.
Trust and Insurance Layers
The industry is attempting to address these gaps through new technical and financial layers. On October 7, Cequence released Agent Trust, a protocol-agnostic registry for agent identity and transaction-level enforcement. Simultaneously, the insurance sector is responding to the risks of automated decision-making. Harbor Insurance emerged from stealth on October 13 with $10 million in seed funding to measure agent risk and insure residual losses. These efforts arrive as traditional carriers, including Berkshire Hathaway, Chubb, and Travelers, have begun introducing AI exclusion endorsements, further isolating merchants from the risks inherent in autonomous commerce.
This represents a misalignment of incentives: distribution velocity is rapidly outpacing merchant readiness, leaving a critical gap in accountability. As agents operate on devices the merchant does not control, the industry faces an unresolved question of who pays for errors. Merchants are effectively forced into a binary choice: enable checkout on these ambient surfaces and accept the liability, or risk watching customers route around them to competitors who have already integrated.
Tessa
Tessa Vaughn works for Forkast.
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