The next iteration in the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has arrived, and organizations are racing to harness the potential of AI agents to create a dynamic new shopping experience. However, as powerful as agentic commerce can be, the road to adoption won’t be without hiccups—many of which will lead to a surge in disputes.

In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Joseph McLean, CEO and Co-Founder of Quavo, and Christopher Miller, Emerging Payments Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the challenges that can arise in the agentic commerce dispute process, the steps financial institutions can take to prepare, and how disputes can serve as an opportunity to engage and retain customers in the age of agentic commerce.

Navigating Uncharted Waters

Traditionally, as the volume of payments has grown, the number of disputed transactions has remained relatively stable. However, as agentic commerce gains traction, this pattern is unlikely to hold.

This shift raises many questions for organizations attempting to navigate these uncharted waters.

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“There is going to be fraud on these transactions; there are going to be mistakes that are made by consumers or by AI,” McLean said. “The regulations aren’t super clear on who is liable in these scenarios when consumers are making purchases. Is it the consumer? Is it the merchant? Is it the issuer? This also opens up new attack vectors for fraudsters, where they can get into the agentic commerce area themselves posing as other people and making purchases.”

In particular, there may be a rise in first-party, or consumer-engaged, fraud. For example, an AI agent might follow its instructions perfectly, yet if the customer is dissatisfied with the outcome, they may still dispute the transaction. Alternatively, a consumer could intentionally make a purchase with the plan to dispute it later—claiming fraud or an AI error.

These situations create grey areas, as liability becomes unclear when a consumer authorizes an agent but doesn’t directly complete the purchase themselves. It’s therefore critical that these issues are resolved before agentic commerce scales further, since confusion and ambiguity could be detrimental to adoption.

“Merchants, payment processors, and card issuers are all going to think about this in terms of liability and consumers are going to think about it in terms of experience,” Miller said. “If they have an experience that doesn’t meet their expectations, that has implications for the growth of this ecosystem.”

“If a consumer doesn’t believe that they’re going to get what they want by delegating authority to choose or to purchase some piece of software that we’re calling an agent right now, they might not use the agent,” he said. “That’s a fundamental limiter on growth here.”

Trusting the Process

To develop a stronger framework around the dispute process, several factors should be considered by financial institutions.

First, FIs will need a mechanism to gauge the consumer’s intent when they instructed and authorized the AI agent.

Given that AI systems can hallucinate or misinterpret instructions, it will be important to verify whether the agent accurately carried out the customer’s request. Understanding consumer intent is also critical because bad actors may attempt to manipulate AI agents—for example, by creating fraudulent websites or impersonating legitimate services to trick AI into making unauthorized transactions.

These challenges also raise broader questions about how to proactively address fraud in an agentic commerce environment.

“When it was a fake website that consumers visited, we could take that head on and teach people what are the ways to recognize a fraudulent website,” Miller said. “If it is your agent that is deceived—if one platform impersonates another within an agentic integration flow—those are entirely outside the sphere of consumer, they can’t do anything about it. It’s interesting to think about not just who is liable, but who will be perceived as having responsibility for solving that problem.”

Issuers, merchants, and agentic AI developers may all need to take on new roles in educating both consumers and AI systems. Considering the potential scope of agentic commerce, an industry consortium approach might also be required to set up comprehensive safeguards.

Regardless of the specific path forward, developing a framework for agentic commerce will likely be necessary sooner rather than later.

“A lot of consumers are using this, and we’re going to see it happen a lot more in 2026 and going forward, but consumers will need to trust what’s happening through the agent,” McLean said. “They will need to trust their merchants, and they will need to trust that their banks can handle it appropriately when something does go wrong.”

Fighting Fire with Fire

To develop this trust, financial institutions can take proactive steps to prepare for the increased volume and complexity of agentic commerce disputes. Historically, many FIs have responded to spikes in fraud or dispute cases by simply adding more personnel to the process. However, this approach is unlikely to be effective in the new paradigm.

“The best way to solve this is going to be pulling in more technology, better solutions that solve the problem end-to-end so that the users at the issuing institutions can spend more time focusing on the complex pieces of the work,” McLean said. “These disputes, they will look very similar, but it’s not going to be just more of the same. It’s going to be much higher volumes that are coming through the door and the complexity of these disputes are certainly going to be different than how they’re used to working through disputes today.”

As financial institutions take stock of the dispute process lifecycle, several important questions will arise. For instance, how will the bank handle communications with the cardholder? How will it manage accounting or reconciliation? And how will institutions handle issuing a new card if one is compromised?

These complex challenges can’t be effectively solved by adding more staff or connecting disparate systems. Doing so often creates siloes, which can lead to delays, errors, and poor experiences for both consumers and merchants.

To address these issues, a comprehensive technology solution that manages the end-to-end dispute lifecycle will be paramount.

“One of the things that we need to look at is fighting fire with fire,” McLean said. “How can we bring in AI and those sorts of technologies into the issuing space to help solve these problems, make faster decisions, augment investigations with better data and better materials to help those solutions work through faster.”

“Making sure resolution times aren’t increasing for consumers, making sure that consumers are made whole, and following all the regulations. There are so many moving parts here that the technology is going to have to solve, especially when we start talking about the first party fraud piece,” he said. “It’s another layer of complexity that we’re going to have to deal with, and an effective dispute technology solution is going to be needed by every issuer to handle this problem.”

A Moment that Matters

As financial institutions search for technology solutions, they should consider platforms that handle the full dispute lifecycle—starting from intake. Platforms like Quavo’s offer a unified data solution to receive and track information, allowing institutions to create audit trails and leverage this data within their fraud systems to fight fraud more proactively.

As disputes surge with the rise of agentic commerce, issuers will no longer need to rely on a patchwork of vendors, technologies, and in-house solutions—unlocking significant efficiency gains and potential revenue improvements.

However, one of the most powerful benefits of a streamlined dispute process is its ability to strengthen customer relationships.

“When a consumer has an issue with their accounts—and largely it’s going to be transaction-related—it can go one of two ways,” McLean said. “It can go very poorly and be a bad experience, where your customer may look to leave your institution—and all the research that we’ve conducted says that absolutely can happen.”

“On the flip side, you can take this into what we’ve always called a moment that matters,” he said. “It’s one of those pieces of banking where you can build real trust and build a much deeper relationship with your account holder.”

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