Prediction: Network Tokens Will Take Center Stage While Agentic Commerce Tests the Industry

It’s that time again! As we start the new year, the NMI Executive Leadership team each lay out their vision for where the payments industry is going. Last time, I predicted that 2025 would be dominated by merchant demand for simpler payment solutions. I still think that’s going to be a major trend in 2026, but this year, I want to focus on a couple of new areas: 

• The emergence of network tokenization as a foundation for future payments
• The questions agentic commerce will force us to answer in order to keep small merchants competitive

Network tokens (which replace sensitive payment details with situational tokens to help invalidate stolen data) have been a big success at NMI, not just in terms of uptake across our platform, but in the tangible benefits they bring to our partners, and I believe 2026 is going to see explosive growth in adoption. Today, the card networks, payment service providers (PSPs) and merchants are all eager to expand the use of this technology, especially as tokenization offers higher approval rates, reduced fraud and improved customer retention and loyalty. In the future, network tokens will also represent the critical infrastructure for payments technologies like biometric checkouts and agentic online shopping.

Additionally, as we look ahead to 2026 and agentic commerce moves closer to mainstream adoption, I think we’ll start to see it create some of the same pressures that shaped early  ecommerce — where only a handful of platforms were able to scale quickly enough and ended up dominating the market. The industry will need to adapt quickly and find ways to keep small merchants competitive as agent-based shopping takes off in 2026 and beyond.

Think about some of the things happening in the payments space today:

• Long-term regulatory pressure to increase data security
• Network trends like the new Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP)
• The need to mitigate fraud (which is rapidly growing in both scale and complexity)
• Merchant demand for more invisible, turnkey payments
• Consumer demand for faster, more secure ways to pay
• The growing importance of subscriptions and recurring payments

Now follow all the lines to the point where they converge, and you’ll find network tokens.

Network tokenization supports most, if not all, of the biggest trends dictating where card-based payments are headed in the coming years. The push for stronger security, higher approval rates, more seamless customer experiences and smarter recurring billing all point toward the same solution — a more modern, resilient way to handle card credentials. That’s exactly what network tokens provide. They’re also a critical part of next-generation checkout experiences like biometric payments, and they form one of the core pillars behind the new agentic commerce programs being rolled out by both Visa and Mastercard.

As a result, I think 2026 will be the year we see a massive uptick in network token adoption, as the technology moves from a growing value-added service to the default option — a foundational, effectively universal layer supporting the vast majority of credit card payments.

The Entire Stakeholder Chain Wants More Network Tokenization

We know that the card networks want network token adoption to proliferate because they currently incentivize it with interchange discounts. But what we’ve seen at NMI over the past year is that our partners and their merchants are also excited about the other benefits network tokenization provides. And those observations fall in line with what recent research has shown.

In a November 2024 report, PYMNTS found that 77% of merchants not already using network tokens planned to roll them out, citing factors like improved customer experiences, higher transaction approval rates and improved compliance and data handling as highly important. And on the PSP side, 90% said they intended to increase their use of network tokens. I think 2026 will be the year we see a lot of that intention become action. 

For more of my insights on network tokens, along with some great thoughts from industry leaders at Mastercard and Giesecke + Devrient, tune in to my latest podcast on Leaders in Payments.

Touching again on agentic commerce, another thing I see coming in the year ahead is the challenge of ensuring agent-based ecommerce sales are accessible to all types of online merchants.

When it comes to AI, there is already a huge gap between big and small business users. Recent data from McKinsey indicates that organizations with over $5 billion in annual revenue are nine times more likely to be using AI than organizations with under $100 million in revenue, and they’re twice as likely to be fully scaled. For the smallest merchants, the gap is much wider.

As we enter the agentic era, that head start — and the resource imbalance that allows it — means we run the real risk of a gap turning into a chasm. To ensure that doesn’t happen and that small merchants can still compete in an agentic world, we need to find answers to some big questions about things like discoverability, agentic checkout integrations and fair play. I think 2026 will be the year the payments industry starts having those conversations in earnest.

Historically, Major Tech Leaps Favor Big Players

By nature, major technology shifts tend to favor large enterprises because adopting them takes capital that small players just don’t have. That was true during early industrialization; it was true during the era of manufacturing automation; and it’s arguably even more true today because now big companies have a huge advantage in data as well as capital.

For a sneak peek at how a big shift toward agentic commerce could unfold, look no further than the pandemic. When COVID-19 shut the world down and we all scrambled to find new ways to shop, ecommerce exploded — by some estimates, squeezing as much as ten years of adoption into 90 days. But in the U.S., the lion’s share of the gains went to just ten large retailers, which accounted for almost 70% of online sales in 2020. By 2021, Amazon alone owned over 56% of U.S. ecommerce sales. Consumers spent more online, but very little made it to the small businesses that needed it most.

When major technology shifts hit, smaller players are often the last to catch up — and sometimes they miss the window entirely. As an industry, we need to make sure the rise of agentic commerce doesn’t trigger another wave of consolidation that pushes small merchants out of the market.

Questions We’ll Need to Answer About Agentic Commerce

As agentic commerce evolves and becomes more common, small business customers across the payments industry will seek clarity and support to stay competitive. To ensure we are ready, we need to confront several foundational questions:

Discoverability and Demand Generation
How do merchants remain discoverable as shoppers increasingly rely on AI agents to search, evaluate and recommend products and services?

Agent-Native Checkout and Payment Flow
How will small merchants embed checkout, payments and fulfillment into early agent-driven shopping experiences, without needing deep technical expertise or custom integrations?

Differentiation in Machine-Mediated Commerce
When purchase decisions are increasingly made by agents rather than humans, how do small businesses communicate brand, value and differentiation in ways machines can understand and prioritize?

Fair Access and Marketplace Dynamics
If discovery and recommendations happen inside opaque systems, how do we prevent agentic commerce from disproportionately favoring the largest sellers or those who can pay for preferential placement?

Scale and Enablement Through Platforms
How do we enable agentic commerce capabilities at scale, so payment providers and platforms can offer turnkey solutions rather than requiring merchants to integrate one by one?

Trust, Authorization, and Liability
Who is authorized to transact on a shopper’s behalf, and where does responsibility lie when an agent makes a mistake, over-spends, or selects the wrong merchant?

Data Ownership and Feedback Loops
Who owns the performance data generated by agent-sourced transactions, and how do merchants gain visibility into why they were recommended, selected — or not selected — by an agent?

Standards, Interoperability, and Fragmentation
Will agentic commerce evolve around shared standards, or will merchants be forced to optimize separately for each agent, platform or ecosystem?

Answering these questions won’t be easy, but unless we do, we risk further consolidation in the ecommerce space that could see agentic shopping completely dominated by the Fortune 50 retailers of the world.

In 2025, I predicted merchants would be hungry for simple payment solutions. The success of network tokens is a great example of what happens when payments companies offer exactly that. Network tokens can be turned on in a merchant’s account dashboard in minutes, and they can immediately start delivering value to both the merchant and its customers, with no friction involved. That’s a big part of why network tokenization is set to explode in 2026. Now, the question is whether we, as an industry, can figure out a similarly simple solution for agentic commerce.

Small merchants are focused on the day-to-day, and they’re not going to become experts in ecommerce agents, general AI or any other future payments technology, for that matter. And it’s our job to ensure they don’t have to. So, while 2026 will be a year of unique new challenges and opportunities, in the end, it all still comes down to keeping it simple.