By 2028, Your Next Customer Might Be an AI Agent. Most Startups Can’t Take Its Money Yet

By 2028, 90 percent of business-to-business buying will run through AI agents, according to a Gartner prediction from October 2025, pushing more than $15 trillion in spending through agent exchanges. In June 2026, Visa said it would plug its payment network into ChatGPT, letting agents pay merchants within spending limits the user sets. Visa said the deal covers businesses as well as consumers.

The buyer side is being built fast. The seller side, a.k.a. you, is not. If your price sits behind a “contact sales” button and you invoice by email on 30-day terms, an agent can’t buy from you and moves on to a seller it can pay.

If an agent does buy, card dispute rules treat it like any other online sale, which leaves you holding most of the risk. Three gaps sit on your side: an offer an agent can complete, a site that lets a verified agent in, and a record that wins the dispute. Then there’s the fee nobody has published.

Give the agent one thing it can buy start to finish

OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT in September 2025, then pulled back in March 2026 and handed checkout back to merchants, saying the first version lacked flexibility. The Associated Press reported that Instant Checkout charged merchants 4 percent of each sale, which merchants considered too expensive.

The daily digest for entrepreneurs and business leaders

Vugar Usi, CEO of the crypto exchange MEXC, has built a way for customers to let AI agents act in their accounts. “My first step would be getting the one customer journey that has the highest value and making it available for agents, testing, and scaling from there,” he says. 

That journey needs a published price, availability, written refund and delivery policies, and a way to order and pay without a sales call. Keep net-30 terms for human buyers if you need them, but take card or bank payment from agents at purchase.

Your bot blocker can’t tell a buyer from a scraper

Most startups block automated traffic, and legitimate buyers now arrive the same way. In October 2025, Visa launched its Trusted Agent Protocol, built with Cloudflare, to help merchants tell shopping agents from malicious bots. Cloudflare said Mastercard and American Express are building on the same signing standard, Web Bot Auth.