Eng Sheng Guan, CEO of Fiuu
Imagine asking an AI assistant to book a trip within your budget or reorder an everyday essential when supplies run low. It finds an option, checks the price, and completes the purchase—all within instructions you set.
The convenience is clear. The harder question is knowing when the AI should stop and ask you again.
That question sits at the heart of agentic commerce, an emerging model in which artificial intelligence could move beyond recommending products to placing orders or initiating payments on a customer’s behalf.
For the Philippines, it could mark the next chapter in a rapidly expanding digital economy. InstaPay processed a record 4.7 billion transactions in 2025, while QR Ph person-to-merchant payments reached 2.5 billion, according to figures cited in the announcement.
With digital transactions increasingly woven into daily life, the next challenge is ensuring that purchases remain authorised and accountable as customers delegate more decisions to technology.
According to Eng Sheng Guan, CEO of Fiuu, the foundations of a trusted payment experience remain unchanged.
“Customers still need confidence that every transaction is authorised, secure, and reliable. As AI plays a greater role in facilitating purchases, the important thing is ensuring that it acts with the customer’s permission and within clearly defined limits.”
A spending limit is only the beginning
In a conventional online purchase, shoppers usually choose an item, review the terms, and confirm payment themselves. Agentic commerce could allow them to hand over parts of that process.
A customer might ask an AI tool to purchase a product below a specified price, repeat a previous marketplace order, or book transport when certain conditions are met.
But even seemingly simple instructions can leave room for uncertainty. Can the agent choose another brand if the preferred item is unavailable? Can it accept a higher delivery fee? Does a cheaper booking still qualify if its cancellation terms are less flexible?
These decisions make the boundaries of permission crucial.
“The first consideration should be customer permission,” Eng explained. “Customers need to understand what they are allowing an agent to do and have the ability to change or withdraw those permissions for future purchases. Identifying the customer and obtaining payment approval are important, but neither establishes the full scope of what the agent was permitted to do.”
For businesses, the distinction matters: confirming who the customer is and approving a payment does not, by itself, establish whether the AI followed the customer’s instructions.
When the price, product, or booking terms change, merchants and platforms need a clear basis for deciding whether to proceed or return the decision to the shopper.
Convenience depends on confidence
The Philippines’ strong adoption of digital payments provides a foundation for these new experiences. Yet security concerns remain a barrier for some consumers.
In a Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas survey cited in the announcement, 55% of respondents who did not use digital payments identified a lack of confidence in security as one reason for non-use.
Greater automation makes that confidence even more consequential. Customers need to understand what they have authorised, how to change their instructions, and where to turn if a purchase goes wrong.
Delivering that assurance does not necessarily require additional prompts at every step. Much of the work can happen behind the scenes through secure payment credentials, reliable transaction records, and clear signals that an action falls within the customer’s permission.
The experience also needs a straightforward path to assistance. When an AI tool, merchant, platform, and payment provider all play a role in a purchase, customers should still be able to understand what happened and seek help.
Start with purchases that have clear rules
Agentic commerce is still developing. For businesses, a practical first step is to identify where automation could solve a specific customer need and where the rules can be defined in advance.
Repeat marketplace purchases, travel bookings, and recurring digital services are potential starting points.
A traveller, for example, could specify a maximum fare, preferred departure time, and acceptable alternatives. An AI tool might proceed when an option meets those conditions, then seek fresh approval if the available booking falls outside them.
The key is a clear handover: businesses must know when the agent has enough authority to act and when the customer needs to take control.
Across borders, the challenge grows
As Philippine consumers and businesses transact across Southeast Asia, automated purchases may also need to work across different payment systems.
Cards, wallets, bank transfers, QR networks, currencies, and approval requirements vary between markets. An automated purchase that works smoothly in one country may encounter different requirements in another.
That makes interoperability—the ability of these systems to work together—a central part of the discussion. AI-assisted commerce will depend on payment infrastructure that can support customer instructions consistently across methods and markets.
“The long-term value of agentic commerce will not come from automation for its own sake. It will depend on whether we can make these new experiences easier to support while keeping customer permission, control, and payment security clear throughout the transaction,” Eng said.
For Filipino shoppers, the promise is less time spent managing routine purchases. Delivering on that promise will require confidence that an AI assistant knows both when it can act and when it must ask.