The field of agentic commerce—a term that describes the use of bots for online buying and selling—is evolving fast. The latest example came Tuesday when cloud computing firm Cloudflare announced a service that will equip your AI agent to go shopping. That service comes in the form of an identity tool, known as cloudflare.id, that will let merchants confirm that an agent is acting on your behalf, and that is paired with a wallet that can hold funds for your agent to spend.
The announcement reflects a profound change in the nature of the Internet, where bots were long a fairly small portion of traffic and primarily treated as a threat or a nuisance. The rise of AI agents has changed all this. Today, around 57% of web traffic consists of bots, according to Cloudflare’s Chief Strategy Officer, Stephanie Cohen, who added that this development has created a new world of business opportunities.
“The internet needs a different business model. In order to have a different business model, you need payments that actually will support that,” said Cohen. “And so, if you look at what Cloudflare has been building towards, we’ve been building towards that future, which is that every interaction on the internet is a chance for commerce.”
