Rezolve CEO Sees Growing Competition Over Control of AI Shopping

Watch more: The Digital Shift With Rezolve AI’s Dan Wagner

Agentic commerce remains a work in progress, with its promise of automated buying colliding with the practical limits of infrastructure, merchant control and overall model reliability.

In the newest Monday Conversation interview, Rezolve AI Founder and CEO Dan Wagner told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that the destination is evident even if the industry is still assembling the parts. The objective is a system where consumers express intent once and agents handle discovery, evaluation and execution without repeated inputs.

He also emphasized that merchants are resisting open access for a reason. “You don’t know my products,” he said, describing the retailer perspective. “You are not going to disaggregate me from my customers.”

At the same time, he acknowledged that consumers will not abandon AI interfaces. “The consumer doesn’t want to deal,” Wagner said. “The consumer wants to go to ChatGPT and ask the question.”

That tension defines the current moment. Retailers must participate in agent-driven commerce while preserving control over customer relationships and product representation.

Wagner outlined two paths toward aspirational outcomes. One involves direct engagement between consumers and merchant agents. The other, more consequential path is agent-to-agent interaction, where AI systems transact on behalf of users and retailers simultaneously.

“We are going to replicate, through generative AI, a much richer experience,” Wagner indicated, describing a shift away from browsing catalogs toward guided, conversational discovery.

The Toaster Problem

As for the headwinds currently in place, Webster described her own attempt to test the system by purchasing a toaster through an AI interface. The experience exposed the gap between discovery and execution.

“The toaster problem failed on two things,” Webster said. “One, it didn’t return the brand that I wanted to buy, and two, I couldn’t buy it.”

She added that current systems function as a smart search function rather than a true commerce engine.  Wagner agreed that the industry is not close to solving those shortcomings, pointing to structural flaws in how models operate.

At the center of the issue is accuracy. “There is a fundamental disconnect between the hallucinations that these models are inherently pushing out and the concern from retailers to open the doors to their warehouses,” Wagner told Webster.

That disconnect creates operational risk. Retailers do not want agents misrepresenting products or generating orders that result in returns and customer dissatisfaction. “The best person to sell trainers to a consumer is the brand owner,” Wagner said. “But not ChatGPT, who’s a generalist.”

From Search to Agents, and a Long Arc of Change

Wagner framed the current moment as the latest step in a decades-long evolution. He began his career in the early 1980s, digitizing newspapers to make them searchable at a time when most people still relied on physical archives.

“When I started, people didn’t have computers,” he said. “The IBM PC was being introduced.”

From there, commerce moved from physical stores to online search and then to eCommerce platforms. Generative AI represents a further shift, one that changes not just where transactions occur, but how people interact with digital systems.

“What you’re actually doing is talking to a probabilistic mathematical algorithm that is guessing the next word,” Wagner said. “But for all intents and purposes, it is a conversation.”

That conversational interface becomes the entry point for commerce, displacing search bars and category navigation.

Agent-to-Agent Commerce and the Scale Problem

The implications are most visible in agent-to-agent interactions. Wagner described a scenario in which a single query triggers hundreds of simultaneous requests across retailers.

“It’s going to interrogate 500 stores every time I ask for something,” he illustrated. “Instead of it being two or three, it’s going to be 500 [merchants] in real time.”

That level of activity places new demands on infrastructure. “Every eCommerce platform on the planet needs to scale up to manage that load,” Wagner said, adding that current systems are not designed for such volume. Webster pointed to the structural uncertainty this creates. “We don’t know the answer really at this point,” she said, referring to whether agentic commerce will function as a marketplace, a channel or something entirely different.

Gatekeepers, Not Gatecrashers

Wagner’s response to those challenges centers on merchant control. He argued that retailers must act as gatekeepers, managing how agents access and present their products.

And against the backdrop of that need, and with a nod to his own firm, “we have built agent infrastructure for the merchant to talk to agents to control the narrative,” he said.

Wagner was unequivocal about the need for new infrastructure. “The new way needs a new system,” he said, arguing that traditional eCommerce interfaces are nearing obsolescence.

He extended that argument to payments. “It’s sitting on old rails,” he said of existing systems, noting that they are not designed for the scale and flexibility required in an agent-driven environment.

Rezolve has introduced its own payment framework, Rezolve Pay, as part of a broader effort to close the gap between discovery and transaction. The company is also investing in blockchain-based infrastructure to support high-volume, real-time interactions.

Growth and Positioning

The company’s recent performance reflects rising demand for that approach. Rezolve reported strong revenue growth and expanding enterprise adoption, with a growing contracted revenue base and deployments across sectors. Wagner said the momentum stems from retailers seeking a structured way to engage with agentic systems.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said, referring to the pace of adoption, where the firm has more than 950 enterprise customers across sectors such as retail and hospitality.

What Comes Next

Standardization remains unresolved. Wagner said the industry will need common frameworks to govern how agents interact with merchants, manage identity and complete transactions. He also emphasized that Rezolve’s model is grounded in software as a service, drawing on earlier shifts to cloud-based commerce platforms. The difference, he said, lies in scale.

“Agents don’t go one by one,” Wagner said. “They go everywhere instantly.”

That reality will determine which players gain traction. Retailers that can represent their products accurately within agent-driven environments are likely to gain visibility, while those that cannot risk being sidelined.

Wagner left little doubt about the direction of travel and its implications for commerce. “What’s happening now,” he told Webster, “is on a whole new scale of extraordinary potential.”

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.