Monica Eaton, CEO of Chargebacks911, was recently featured in Finextra discussing how the rise of agentic commerce is creating an unexpected challenge for merchants: legitimate AI-initiated purchases being incorrectly flagged as malicious bot activity. The article explores how traditional fraud systems, designed around human behavior patterns, are struggling to adapt as autonomous AI shopping agents become more common in ecommerce.
The piece examines how AI shopping assistants are rapidly moving from experimental tools to active participants in online commerce. Major payment networks and ecommerce platforms are already piloting agent-initiated transactions, allowing AI systems to search, compare, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers. While these tools promise convenience and efficiency, they also disrupt many of the behavioral signals fraud systems traditionally rely on to distinguish legitimate customers from bad actors.
“The fraud systems most merchants rely on today were built to detect bad human behavior,” Monica explained. “They were not designed for a world where a legitimate AI agent and a malicious bot look almost identical.”
According to the article, many fraud tools currently depend on markers such as typing cadence, mouse movement, click behavior, and device fingerprints to validate transactions. Agent-initiated purchases disrupt those assumptions entirely, increasing the likelihood of false declines that block legitimate sales. Chargebacks911 warns that as agentic commerce scales, merchants who fail to modernize their fraud and evidence infrastructure may unintentionally lose growing amounts of valid revenue through overly aggressive fraud screening.
“As agentic commerce scales, merchants face a clear choice,” Monica added. “Adapt their detection and evidence infrastructure now, or watch a growing share of legitimate revenue get declined by their own systems.”
