Why ambient payments misread what shopping is really for
Apparently “the checkout page is dead.” VISA, it seems, wants to make commerce ambient. Shopping, in this vision, becomes so seamless that it vanishes into the background. You see something. You want it. You get it. No friction. No steps. No checkout.
This kind of story is seductive. It flatters our bias toward convenience, efficiency, and the steady technological flattening of human effort. But it also misreads the system it claims to transform.
We’re not replacing shopping with something better. We’re replacing it with “shopping.” The simulation of intent. A caricature of taste. A hollowed-out choreography of consumption in which agents act on our behalf without understanding who we are, what we care about, or why one Pedro Pascal t-shirt might matter more than another.
The problem isn’t technical—it’s conceptual. Shopping isn’t just the act of acquiring things. It’s a site of interpretation. A means of expressing identity, exploring taste, negotiating trade-offs, discovering what matters.
When I type “Pedro Pascal t-shirt” into a search bar, I’m not asking for the cheapest or most statistically probable option. I might be referencing a meme, making a joke, expressing fandom, or searching for the perfect blend of irony and aesthetic. These are not surface-level signals that can be abstracted into preference vectors. They are contextually situated acts of meaning.
Ambient agents—no matter how sophisticated—can’t (yet) model this richness. They can infer behaviour, but not intention. Predict, but not interpret. Automate, but not understand. Which is why the dream of frictionless commerce often ends up delivering an anaemic version of consumer life: technically impressive, but humanly shallow.
This is precisely the kind of misreading I explored in Why We Keep Misreading Disruption. We assume transformation looks like streamlining—replacing messy, human systems with smoother, faster, more automated versions. But true disruption isn’t a linear substitution of parts. It’s a reframing of the whole.
In the case of payments, that reframing isn’t about making checkout disappear. It’s about asking what role commerce plays in the broader ecology of meaning, identity, and agency.
What if the value of shopping isn’t in the transaction, but in the process of deciding? What if commerce is less about buying and more about becoming? These are not questions that “pay-by-want” architectures are equipped to ask.
It’s worth pausing here, because I’ve used the term ambient shopping myself—in a very different sense. When I describe commerce becoming ambient, I don’t mean it becomes automatic. I mean it becomes contextual. Shopping no longer begins with a conscious act of searching. It’s increasingly entangled with the ambient signals of culture—products surfacing in TikTok videos, recommended by trusted newsletters, discovered in the margins of other conversations. The point is not automation, but emergence.
There’s a world of difference between shopping ambiently and being shopped on. The former invites interpretation. The latter replaces it.
So while VISA envisions ambient shopping as passive desire fulfilled by infrastructure, I see it as active meaning-making embedded in networks. One turns shopping into plumbing. The other into a mode of discovery. The risk is that we confuse the two—and in doing so, strip the act of shopping of the very agency and nuance that makes it valuable.
If we take the system seriously, then the opportunity isn’t to make today’s model more efficient. It’s to notice what’s missing, what’s changing, and what’s possible.
- Instead of ambient agents that guess what we want, we might imagine tools that help us reflect on what we value.
- Instead of automating taste, we might explore new forms of curation as dialogue—participatory, social, context-aware.
- Instead of compressing the act of shopping into a single invisible step, we might design for slower, richer, more intentional experiences.
Transformation doesn’t lie in removing friction from the known. It lies in discovering new kinds of value, new ways of participating, new puzzles to solve.
The idea that payments should become ambient feels inevitable only if we mistake convenience for progress. But convenience is a narrow lens. It optimises for the immediate and the visible. It misses the quieter, more foundational shifts—how tastes evolve, how identities form, how meaning emerges from context.
VISA isn’t wrong to want to evolve the consumer experience. But the future of commerce won’t be won by those who make it vanish. It will be shaped by those who recognise what it’s really for. And what it’s for—at least in part—is not just acquiring, but understanding. Not just shopping, but interpreting. Not just the transaction, but the transformation.