Novel approach is designed to capture, authenticate, and preserve customer purchase intent as AI agents transact on their behalf
American Express published its Intent Intelligence framework, detailing the company’s recommended approach to capturing and authenticating a customer’s purchase intent before an AI agent completes a transaction. The framework then preserves that intent as a control throughout the transaction lifecycle. By making its framework publicly available, American Express aims to help advance a common industry approach for intent in agentic commerce.
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At the core of Intent Intelligence is an approach that differs from current implementations by making a customer’s authorized purchase intent available to the issuer earlier in the transaction lifecycle — before an agent executes a purchase. This can enable the customer’s intent to serve as a control throughout the transaction, with the aim of helping the resulting purchase align with what the customer approved. The framework is available through the Amex Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit.
“Building trust into AI-powered transactions is critical to the adoption of agentic commerce,” said Luke Gebb, Head of Global Innovation at American Express. “Providing authorized purchase intent before an agent transacts can give issuers greater confidence that an agent is acting as a customer intended, while also helping issuers proactively manage risk and reduce the chance of costly disputes across the payments ecosystem.”
Intent Intelligence
In agentic commerce, a customer tells an AI agent what they want and authorizes it to make a purchase when certain conditions are met. Intent Intelligence is designed to provide a way to carry the customer’s purchase instructions through the transaction lifecycle. Here’s how it works:
- Create and confirm intent: The Create Intent API captures the customer’s purchase instructions and constraints—such as Merchant, maximum budget, and other preferences. The customer then authenticates their identity and signs off on the intent captured by the agent.
- Establish proof of intent: An Intent ID, a unique identifier for the customer’s intent, is created along with a Proof of Intent Token that represents the captured intent’s high-level constraints.
- Scope the payment credential: The Proof of Intent Token can be used to obtain a secure digital payment credential that the agent uses at checkout instead of the customer’s actual Card Number. The customer’s authorized intent is used to scope the payment credential, helping purchases remain aligned with what the customer approved.
- Apply intent throughout the transaction: The Intent ID and Proof of Intent Token can serve as controls in subsequent steps of the purchase journey, helping validate that a purchase request aligns with what the customer authorized and supporting fraud prevention, authorization decisioning, and dispute resolution.
How user intent is collected may vary across agentic commerce models. Intent Intelligence is designed to be flexible across these models, regardless of who captures intent, while helping preserve what the user authorized throughout the transaction lifecycle.
Intent Intelligence and the ACE Developer Kit
As both an issuer and a network, American Express brings a perspective that spans both sides of a payment transaction—from how customers authorize and manage purchases to how Merchants, issuers, and payment networks securely process them. That experience informs how Amex approaches questions of trust, risk, customer control, and interoperability as AI agents begin to transact on consumers’ behalf.
Amex developed Intent Intelligence as a core service of ACE to bring that perspective to agentic commerce. As the agentic ecosystem continues to evolve, Amex is actively developing ACE Kit integrations.
Advancing Common Standards for Agentic Commerce
American Express is committed to collaborating across the industry to help advance common, interoperable standards for agentic commerce. This includes engaging with EMVCo to support secure card-based agentic transactions and supporting the x402 Foundation’s work to advance standards for internet-native payments.
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