AI Governance of Agentic Commerce

As someone who spends most of my time helping organisations understand the governance, risk and strategic implications of AI, I wasn't at CryptoCon NZ to hear predictions about Bitcoin prices.

I went because agentic commerce creates one of the next major AI governance challenges. 

If AI agents are going to search, compare, recommend, negotiate and eventually transact on behalf of people or organisations, then governance needs to move beyond content, privacy and hallucination risk. It needs to deal with authority, accountability, payment, fraud, auditability and trust.

In 2026, much of the discussions I have around Generative AI has focused on how AI is moving from generating outputs to taking actions.

Agents are already capable of researching options, comparing products, gathering information and making recommendations. The next step is obvious: purchasing services, accessing data, subscribing to software and conducting transactions on behalf of people and organisations.

At CryptoCon I listened to Paul Quickenden , Jenny Wei, Jade Smyth （史婕玉）, Kayur Patel, Trevor Topfer, as well as hearing from two Government MPs Ryan Hamilton and Joseph Mooney. Thanks too to David Haslop and Phil Ohren.

Instead, there was significant discussion around stablecoins, digital payment infrastructure and the practical mechanisms that may underpin an emerging agent economy in New Zealand.

I have been working with GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and a growing number of organisations are currently focused on how they appear in AI-generated answers. That's a very sensible place to start. If customers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot for recommendations, visibility within those systems matters!

The challenge is will soon no longer be just how your organisation appears in an AI-generated response but whether an AI agent can evaluate your offering, verify trust, understand pricing, access the necessary information and complete a transaction. In other words, the future of digital commerce may be as much about machine-to-machine interactions as human-to-machine interactions.

It was really encouraging to see representatives from the Financial Markets Authority – Te Mana Tātai Hokohoko and New Zealand Government participating directly in the discussion. New Zealand often gets criticised for moving cautiously on emerging technology, but there is real value in regulators, policymakers and industry having these conversations together.

The governance questions are substantial. I've put together a 2 hour course to explore them. These governance questions are more important than the technology questions.

I left CryptoCon convinced that the most interesting developments in this space are not about cryptocurrency speculation but rather the new intersection with agentic AI. 

For more see https://mattensor.ai/

This blog is also published on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-governance-agentic-commerce-matt-ensor-b3lle/