Can Global Payments Gain From Growing Consumer Trust in AI Commerce?
Global Payments Inc. GPN recently said that consumers are warming quickly to AI agents that can shop and pay for them. Its latest Agentic Commerce Report found that people now expect AI to make 15% of their purchases within five years, up from 9% a year ago. Among Americans, 45% have used or would consider using an AI shopping agent, 69% use AI to find better deals, and 63% use it to save time.
Comfort is rising fastest for routine purchases. Global Payments says that merchants should prepare to support agent-led transactions safely, while keeping consumers in control and maintaining trusted payment experiences at scale. AI is moving from helping shoppers research products to actually completing transactions. Consumer comfort with letting AI spend up to $50 jumped sharply: cinema tickets rose from 32% to 82%, meal delivery from 30% to 78%, gift cards from 28% to 77%, and subscriptions from 27% to 69%.
Spending limits are also widening, with 69% willing to let agents spend up to $100 on groceries and clothing. Still, adoption has limits: 50% worry about payment security, 46% about privacy, and 42% about AI making the wrong purchase, keeping trust central to adoption over the coming years.
For Global Payments, use of AI shopping agents could create a transaction channel across its merchant payments network, potentially supporting volumes and demand for fraud, security, authentication, and checkout tools. The company manages trillions of dollars in payment volume and billions of transactions across more than 175 countries, giving it scale to serve merchants as agentic commerce develops.
How Are Peers Placed?
Several of GPN’s payments peers, like Fiserv, Inc. FISV and PayPal Holdings, Inc. PYPL, are already building infrastructure for agent-led transactions.
Fiserv is preparing for agentic commerce by helping merchants make product data, identity, loyalty and payment systems accessible to AI-driven shopping journeys. It is also expanding agentic AI capabilities through agentOS, which gives financial institutions a controlled framework for deploying AI agents across banking and payment workflows. PayPal is taking a more transaction-focused approach. Its Agentic Commerce Services support product discovery, cart management and checkout through AI experiences, while Braintree’s Agent Ready offering lets merchants accept payments initiated by assistants such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Global Payments’ Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates
Shares of GPN have gained 8.6% year to date, outperforming the broader industry’s 13.2% decline.
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From a valuation standpoint, Global Payments trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 5.45X, lower than the industry average. GPN currently carries a Value Score of A.
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The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Global Payments’ 2026 earnings implies an 11.6% rise year over year, followed by 17.9% growth next year.
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The stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
