Forrester Says B2B Payments Are Where Agentic Commerce Gets Tested for Real

Forrester analyst Meng Liu defines B2B agentic payments as “programmable, policy-governed payment flows in which AI agents act on behalf of businesses to initiate, authorize, execute, and reconcile transactions,” and identifies three use cases already forming around that definition: automating finance operations like invoice capture and policy enforcement, enabling machine-to-machine commerce where agents pay per use for the digital services they consume, and optimizing working capital through real-time payment decisions based on live cash position. The research maps an emerging three-layer protocol stack competing to own the plumbing underneath: discovery protocols (MCP, A2A), commerce protocols (ACP, UCP), and payment protocols themselves — Stripe’s MPP, Coinbase’s x402, Mastercard Agent Pay, and Ant International’s agentic mobile protocol all built to compete for the same layer. Forrester’s core recommendation is not to bet on a single protocol, but to build layered architecture that separates discovery, commerce, identity, execution, and settlement.

The “who settles the transaction” problem Forrester is describing for B2B finance is the same fight that’s already broken out in a completely different vertical. Hospitality’s agentic-booking economy has been fighting over exactly this question since OpenAI and Stripe launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google shipped its Agent Payments Protocol in September 2025: once an AI agent can execute a hotel booking directly, hotels now face three competing commission structures — OTA-in-chat arrangements at existing rates, MCP aggregators introducing new intermediary fees, and proprietary MCP servers hotels control themselves — with one hospitality-AI consultant warning that without clearer rules, independent hotels risk repeating the OTA-search-engine pattern of paying repeatedly just to reach their own guests.

For sales and GTM teams, Forrester’s framing makes the same point in B2B commerce terms: as agents start initiating and settling transactions on both sides of a deal, the protocol layer a company builds or adopts now determines who captures the fee later — a decision hospitality already learned it can’t defer.