E-commerce is on the verge of its most significant disruption since the rise of digital checkout. The new frontier, known as agentic commerce, envisions a world in which artificial intelligence agents shop autonomously, handling everything from search to payment. But while giants like OpenAI, Amazon, and Perplexity are still grappling with technical and regulatory hurdles to make this vision a reality, Popmarq, a Brazilian fintech focused on live commerce and AI, is already operating at the epicenter of this transformation.

From e-commerce to “AI-commerce.”

According to a report by The Information, the core promise of agentic commerce is both ambitious and straightforward: an assistant capable of understanding commands like “find a black running shoe with good reviews under $150 and buy it for me,” completing the entire journey intelligently and securely.

In practice, however, the landscape remains chaotic. Retail platforms were not built to accommodate non-human agents; captchas, pop-ups, and inconsistent checkout flows create friction between AI’s promise and the real world. In addition, as the article points out, today’s banking security infrastructure is designed to block bots—not authorize them.

It is within this context that the role of hybrid companies like Popmarq becomes strategic: building bridges between intelligent automation, human experience, and trusted financial infrastructure.

Popmarq as an “AI concierge” for commerce

Founded in Brazil, Popmarq began as a social live commerce fintech, a model that blends live streaming, community engagement, and instant payments. Beneath the surface, however, it has evolved into a transactional AI platform, featuring an intelligent concierge capable of:

• Conversing with customers via voice or text to understand purchase intent;

• Cross-referencing product data, inventory, and consumer profiles;

• Recommending and executing purchases within live sessions, storefronts, or the broader banking ecosystem.

In practical terms, Popmarq is already doing today what agentic commerce promises for tomorrow.

By unifying conversational AI, digital identity, and payment processing—with partners such as Banco Santander—the platform anticipates the model of a banking-commercial autonomous agent: an agent capable of acting, not merely suggesting.

“While the world debates how agents will one day be able to shop autonomously, we’ve already built an environment where they sell, recommend, and finance ethically and under supervision. The future of commerce isn’t just intelligent—it’s relational.”

— Arthur Piccolo, Co-founder of Popmarq

Banks and AI: an inevitable convergence

The Information highlights how Visa and Mastercard are launching dedicated APIs and tokens to enable payments executed by AI agents, with customized limits and context-based authentication. This is precisely the type of infrastructure Popmarq has been exploring within Santander, connecting recommendation AI, credit, and instant checkout into a single secure journey.

The key difference lies in the experience: rather than a “bot” navigating websites, Popmarq’s agent operates within a closed, validated ecosystem, with verified data and identities—an environment where fraud risk is minimal, and the value of personalization is maximized.

From Brazil to the world

Agentic commerce may emerge as a global trend. Still, it finds its most fertile ground in the Global South—regions with high smartphone penetration, decentralized marketplaces, and intensely social consumer behavior. Popmarq, already integrating AI, payments, and real-time recommendations, represents a more human and locally grounded version of this revolution.

While OpenAI and Amazon work to balance power and privacy, Popmarq bets on trust and community, where the agent is an extension of the relationship between consumer, merchant, and bank.

The future of shopping isn’t automatic—it’s empathetic.

AI-driven commerce doesn’t need to replace humans—it needs to understand them. The next leap won’t be purely technological, but emotional: agents that grasp context, desire, and timing. And in this regard, Popmarq isn’t following a global trend—it’s helping define it.