SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Kachyng Inc. today published “When AI Agents Go Shopping,” the second paper in its State of Agent Commerce series. The paper walks the full agent-commerce protocol stack in the order you would actually build it, layer by layer, through one running story: a customer, a sock shop, and its wool supplier.
AI agents are beginning to transact — searching, carting, checking out, and paying on behalf of people and businesses. In under two years, more than a dozen protocols have appeared to standardize this. The paper maps all of them in plain English, and each layer gets two treatments: what it does, and where it may break.
Three findings emerge from the map.
First, retail agent commerce is being standardized quickly. Discovery, checkout, customer approval, and payment verification each now have credible, well-backed protocols, although rivals overlap and several have already changed shape after first contact with the market.
Second, every protocol on the map assumes the business's internal logic is already agent-ready. None of them defines it.
Third, enterprise commerce — contracts, purchase orders, approvals, invoices, payment terms — remains almost entirely unaddressed, and that is where the money is: global B2B payment volume runs at roughly $89 trillion a year against about $6 trillion for retail e-commerce.
What is missing is an operating layer: the machinery that turns software built for humans into governed surfaces agents can safely operate, with identity, policy, approvals, limits, and evidence built in. The paper's closing addendum describes how Kachyng's AGX and IDX address exactly that layer.
About Kachyng
Kachyng Inc. is building payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. Headquartered in San Francisco, Kachyng's A-Commerce platform — comprising IDX, AGX, KYA, and PRX — provides the trust, identity, authorization, and payment routing layer that enables AI agents to transact on traditional financial rails. www.kachyng.com