E-commerce is on the verge of its biggest disruption since the invention of credit cards. That’s the warning from Safwan Zaheer, a Fintech operator who has helped build three category-defining companies and lived through the mobile payments revolution firsthand. He believes most merchants are unprepared for what’s coming next, and many are unknowingly sleepwalking into obsolescence. The shift, Safwan argues, is already underway: the customer journey no longer begins on a homepage or a mobile app. It now begins with a single typed request to an AI agent: “Find me the best noise-canceling headphones under $300 with great battery life, sorted by reviews and price.”
“That single sentence just became your new storefront,” Safwan says. If your product isn’t in the top three results the AI agent returns, you don’t exist. Brand visibility, product selection, and checkout are all moving upstream into the question a customer asks, not the site a customer visits. And this isn’t a future scenario. ChatGPT is approaching 1 billion users. Perplexity is processing millions of purchase-intent queries daily. The shift is happening now, and it’s accelerating.
From Bot-Blocking to Bot-Embracing: The Great Payment Paradox
Retailers spent the last decade building walls to keep bots out of checkout flows: captchas, device fingerprinting, velocity checks, risk scores, all aimed at stopping automated traffic. But here’s the paradox, Zaheer explains: “Agentic AI is automated traffic too. Only this time, it’s authorized, intentional, and represents real customers with real money.”
That flips the playbook. Merchants must now enable payments for AI agents while ensuring the bot is a trusted agent acting for a verified customer. “That requires new plumbing between merchants, processors, and networks,” Safwan says. “Authentication and authorization must extend beyond cardholders and devices to AI agents acting on their behalf.” Risk and UX teams will need new controls, whitelists, and rules to separate a customer’s trusted agent from a fraudster’s script.
Discovery in Compressed Interfaces: Your Brand Becomes a Single Sentence
Here’s the existential risk for merchants: brand discovery is being compressed into AI model responses. “When someone asks for running shoes for marathon training, the AI doesn’t showcase your glossy product page, lifestyle photos, or brand story,” Safwan explains. “It returns a ranked list based on data, reviews, and specifications.” The effect is ruthless. A million-dollar brand identity gets reduced to a line item.
“This is the Amazon effect on steroids. If you’re not in the top 3 to 5 results an AI agent returns, you’re invisible. Period,” Safwan says.
Everything is turning headless. Backend systems are decoupled from storefronts, and commerce is collapsing into the agentic chat layer. The only viable path forward, according to Safwan, is to open headless store infrastructure to trusted third parties. “Merchants have long guarded the checkout flow as the crown jewel,” he notes. “But for AI commerce to work inside a chatbot, ‘Buy’ must be seamless. Customers should only need to enter credentials and shipping details once, and after that, checkout should execute invisibly.” The Achilles’ heel of headless commerce, however, is control. “A careless agent developer can distort your catalog, misrepresent your inventory, or wreck your brand. That’s why openness must be paired with standards and governance” Safwan warns.
Three Power Moves Merchants Can Make Now
1. Embrace Headless Commerce Architecture — But Keep Control
Safwan suggests small but decisive steps: “Enable checkout endpoints that can securely receive network tokens like Visa’s Intelligent Commerce token. Adopt standards such as MCP-UI (Model Context Protocol for UI) so agents can present products and checkout buttons in a standardized way.” This ensures conversational discovery leads directly to conversion while merchants retain control over how their store is represented.
2. Flip Your Payment Strategy from Blocking to Allowlisting
“AI agents must be treated as first-class participants in the payment flow,” Safwan emphasizes. That means reworking acceptance so trusted agents can present identity, intent, and consent. The shift is clear: build allowlists, not blocklists. Retrain fraud models to say yes to the right AI traffic.
3. Optimize for Prompt-Based Discovery
“Treat AI prompts as your new primary marketing channel,” Safwan says. Structuring product data, reviews, policies, and fulfillment details in machine-readable formats allows AI models to surface offerings credibly and instantly. “It’s not just SEO anymore, it’s AI-EO,” he explains. “Your goal is to be in that top three to five results.”
Why Safwan Zaheer’s Perspective Matters
For Safwan, technology’s role in financial services has always been clear: remove friction, unlock opportunity, and deliver impact at scale. He has been in the trenches of every major wave, the mobile payments revolution, the neobanking surge, the rise of AI in lending.
“Each time, the companies that moved first captured disproportionate market share,” he reflects. “But this wave is different. It’s bigger. Faster. More permanent.”
Unlike previous digital transformations that matured over years, AI is scaling at consumer-internet speed, with billion-user platforms rewriting commerce in real time. Safwan is clear: Agentic AI won’t replace brand building or great merchandising. But it will change where those disciplines show up. “The storefront becomes the sentence. The checkout becomes an API call. The loyalty loop becomes a recurring instruction an agent executes,” he says. Merchants that adapt will thrive. Those who don’t risk vanishing into the chat interface.
Follow Safwan Zaheer on LinkedIn for more insights on how AI is reshaping commerce, payments, and brand engagement.
