Craig DeWitt is the founder of Skyfire, a payment network for AI.
Every merchant leadership team I meet agrees on two things. The first is that customer relationships are the business. Accounts, loyalty, purchase history and permission to communicate are what separate a brand from a vending operation. The second is that the moment designed to create that relationship—account registration—is one of the most disliked steps in all of shopping.
Baymard Institute has tracked the reasons shoppers abandon carts for more than a decade, and being asked to create an account consistently ranks near the top of the list. Think about what that means. A customer has found the product, decided to buy and reached for their wallet. At the exact peak of their intent, we interrupt them with a form. The form asks them to invent a password they will forget, confirm an email address and volunteer personal details before they have received anything in return.
Some buyers simply leave. Many of the ones who stay protect themselves with a throwaway email and whatever birthday gets them through the screen. The customer relationship starts with friction.
The Truce Nobody Likes
Guest checkout became the industry’s compromise, and it is a strange one when you look at it directly. To save the sale, the merchant gives up the relationship. The customer gets convenience, the brand gets a transaction with no guaranteed future and the premise of direct commerce quietly leaks away one order at a time.
Merchants accepted this trade because the alternative was losing the order entirely, but we are leaving that world.
What Agents Change About The Beginning
AI shopping agents are usually discussed as a checkout story: software that can search, compare and complete a purchase on a person’s behalf. The more interesting story is what they change about the beginning of the relationship. An agent acting for a customer can do the one thing we could never reasonably ask of the customer at the moment of purchase: handle the registration.
This is not a speculative audience, either. Salesforce measured $262 billion in global online sales influenced by AI and agents during the 2025 holiday season alone. The delegation habit is forming right now, at scale, and every delegated purchase raises a similar question: What happens to the relationship when the customer sends software in their place?
Picture the same purchase with a trusted agent involved. The customer delegates the errand. Their agent arrives at the storefront carrying proof that it represents a real, verified person, along with the permissions that person has chosen to extend. Creating the account takes the agent seconds and costs the customer nothing. The merchant receives something better than a filled-in form: a customer record that is accurate on day one and honest about what it is allowed to be used for.
For marketing teams, this arrives at a useful moment. The industry has spent years watching third-party signals degrade while regulators and platforms narrow what can be tracked. An account created by a verified agent is first-party data of the highest grade, explicitly permissioned and correct from the first interaction. The addressable relationship marketers have been trying to reconstruct through clean rooms and probabilistic matching simply shows up at the front door and introduces itself.
Why Trust Has To Come First
Merchants block automated traffic today for good reason. Radware found that total bot traffic on e-commerce sites passed human traffic for the first time in the 2024 holiday season, and its latest report puts malicious bots alone at 43% of traffic, within three points of human shoppers and fake registrations up sixfold. Fake account creation is already a fraud pattern merchants are trying to suppress. Any honest vision for autonomous registration has to start by acknowledging that an unverified agent asking to open an account looks exactly like the attack.
Building that proof layer is now industry work. Letting an agent cryptographically prove which operator sent it is moving through the IETF, and the major AI assistants already sign their traffic that way. The harder part—binding an agent’s action to a verified person’s specific intent—entered formal standards work in spring 2026 when the FIDO Alliance (the body behind passkeys) formed working groups on agentic authentication and commerce. Most standards are still drafts, and the work is strongest at payment and thinnest at registration. Who bears the loss on a fraudulent agent-created account is unsettled, but the sequencing holds. Agent identity has to come before agent commerce. Once verification is solved, registration stops being a form and becomes a handshake.
Where Marketers Can Start
For marketing and growth leaders, preparing for this is less technical than it sounds. Start by walking your own registration flow and counting what it asks of a customer at their moment of highest intent. Every field you cannot justify is friction an agent will soon make unnecessary, and a competitor may drop it first.
Then decide what a verified, agent-created account should be entitled to on day one. If a customer arrives with proven identity and explicit permissions, do they start at the bottom of your loyalty program, or do they start recognized? The answer says a lot about whether your brand treats registration as a gate or as a welcome, and the merchants who treat permissioning as part of the product will be the ones agents and their owners prefer to transact with.
The End Of The Standoff
The paradox was never permanent. Merchants were right to insist on relationships, and customers were right to resent the way we asked for them. Agents help resolve the standoff by absorbing the clerical work that neither side ever wanted to do, and the relationship that emerges is stronger because nothing false was required to start it.
The most hated step in the customer journey just might disappear. What replaces it is the thing merchants wanted all along: a customer who is genuinely, verifiably there.
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