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AI agents are poised to fundamentally change how consumers discover, evaluate, and buy from brands. This session looks beyond today's technology to explore what commerce could look like as personalized agents increasingly act on customers' behalf. Forter's founders will unpack what this shift means for merchant discovery, trust, and customer relationships - and the decisions businesses should be making now.

As agentic AI reshapes commerce, trust is becoming more critical at every stage of the customer journey. Forter's leadership will share a forward-looking vision for building trust into personalized experiences and smarter business decisions. The session will also feature a merchant showcase demonstrating how technology is being used to solve real-world business challenges.

While the volume of agentic transactions doesn't match the volume of noise in the market, there's no doubt that being prepared for what happens next is key. In this session, we'll hear from merchants who are building for the future today - why they invested before the numbers demanded it, what they're watching as the ecosystem keeps shifting under them, and what it actually takes to grow into this channel without opening the door to the fraud that inevitably follows.

Your payments stack was built around a human - someone clicking through checkout, proving who they are, deciding to buy. Agent-initiated transactions break those assumptions: they change how payments flow, who or what authenticates, where liability sits, and what a smart routing strategy looks like. In this breakout session, a merchant already seeing agent volume walks through how they're adapting their stack for a buyer that behaves nothing like the one it was designed for - where the old routing and authentication logic holds up, and where it breaks. If you're staring at a stack you know wasn't built for this, it's a chance to see how someone else is starting to re-build theirs.

Not every decline should happen. Issuer behavior, authentication requirements, payment routing, network performance, and customer history all influence whether a legitimate purchase succeeds or fails. Join this peer discussion to explore how leading merchants are improving payment performance. We'll discuss which metrics actually matter, where the biggest opportunities exist, and how teams are balancing conversion, fraud, and customer experience.

Merchants have spent years stripping friction out of the customer journey - until the moment something goes wrong and the customer lands in a service queue that reports to a different leader, tracks different metrics, and doesn't always have access to the same systems and information. That handoff is where a lot of the goodwill built upstream quietly leaks away. This table talk is a working session for practitioners trying to close that gap - how to align CX and customer service around shared metrics instead of competing ones, and what it actually takes to make the handoff feel invisible to the customer even when the org chart says otherwise.

Merchants have invested heavily in removing friction from the customer journey, yet much of that goodwill can disappear when a customer needs help. This working session explores how CX and customer service teams can align around shared metrics, systems, and goals. Attendees will compare approaches for creating a seamless customer experience even when ownership spans different teams.

Every technical decision has a budget decision sitting upstream of it - and it often reaches your desk well before the ROI data does. This is a small-group, round-table conversation for leaders wrestling with how far and how fast to commit when the business case has to be built on conviction, not a finished spreadsheet. It's the room where you hear how peers are sizing the opportunity and defending the spend internally - the part of the job that rarely gets talked about openly.

You've optimized everything up to the buy button: personalization, payment methods, a frictionless checkout. But the buy button was never the finish line. In the split second after a customer hits "place order," a chain of decisions runs between your stack, their bank, and the payments ecosystem - and it decides whether the sale actually completes. That layer is optimizable, and it shows up in conversion rate, acceptance rate and customer acquisition cost. This roundtable is for those who own the outcome but not the infrastructure. It digs into where routing, authentication, and fraud decisions are costing you good customers, what a growing payment-method mix does to your backend, and how to make the internal case when payments isn't yours to own.

Loyalty programs were designed to earn a person's attention - the points, the tiers, the nudges that keep people coming back. Strip out the human and hand the decision to an agent optimizing for price and speed, and most of that architecture has nothing to grab onto. Led by a merchant who's rethinking loyalty for exactly this shift, this table topic is a hands-on diagnostic: audit your own loyalty setup through the eyes of an automated buyer and find where it holds up, where it collapses, and what still earns loyalty when no one's there to feel it.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha's purchasing power and influence over household spend are already real. 52% of Gen Alpha kids already share carts with parents for approval, and nearly 1 in 4 already shop unsupervised through apps. Retail is the last major consumer category without household account infrastructure, and the clock is ticking. Agentic commerce is projected to hit $135B by 2027, operating at the account level and leaving unprepared retailers invisible to it. As companies rush to build household and teen account infrastructure to capture this spend, they're inheriting real exposure: minor-user compliance obligations (COPPA, AADC, state privacy law), new fraud vectors unique to shared/group accounts, and unresolved questions about verifying AI agents transacting on a household's behalf. This roundtable brings merchants together to discuss capturing the upside of family commerce without absorbing its risk.

By popular demand, we'll be hosting vertical-specific tables alongside our use-case tables - giving merchants a chance to connect with direct peers in their space. Choose from: Apparel, Accessories & Beauty; Food & Beverage/QSR; and Retail Distribution & Marketplaces.

Fraud, payments, and AI are converging fast, and the leaders getting ahead are making calls on org design, budget, and strategy before the playbook exists to back them up. This is a candid, unscripted conversation among senior commerce leaders about the decisions actually on their desks: how they're redrawing team and org structures as these functions merge; where they're placing bets across technology, partners, and people; how they make the internal case ahead of the proof; and how they hold a team together when the ground won't sit still. If you're making these same calls without a template to follow, this is the room where you'll hear how your peers are approaching them.

As AI agents begin taking actions on behalf of customers, merchants face new questions around trust, control, identity, permission, fraud, and accountability. The challenge is not simply deciding whether to adopt agentic commerce, but understanding what needs to be in place before it can scale safely. In this breakout, practitioners will discuss how they are evaluating AI use cases and providers, where risk emerges as experimentation moves into production, and which controls matter most. Attendees will leave with a practical view of what merchants should assess now to prepare for agentic commerce without getting ahead of the technology.

The best payments system isn't the one that works today - it's the one that still works when everything else changes. This session explores what it really means to have an objective, agnostic foundation for your payments strategy, and why that independence matters more than ever as payment methods, regulations, and customer expectations keep shifting. You'll leave with a clearer framework for spotting hidden constraints in your current stack and a practical sense of what genuine flexibility looks like, so you can adopt what's next without re-building what you already have.

Returns and policy abuse cost far more than the refund itself - and it's genuine customers who pay for it, through tighter policies, longer waits, and lower trust built to guard against someone else's behavior. This breakout features a merchant putting hard numbers to that hidden cost and then tackling it directly - including the hardest part: telling a genuine return from an abusive one when the two can look nearly identical, and tightening controls without punishing the customers they most want to keep.

Agentic readiness is easy to talk about in the abstract - this is your chance to figure out where you actually stand. Led by a senior fraud leader whose team is deep in agentic integration right now, this small-group, round-table working session has you map your own position across the three dimensions that decide readiness: catalog infrastructure, payments rail, and the trust and identity layer. By the end, you'll have an honest read on your own gaps - and a sharper sense of what "ready" actually looks like from people working the same problem.

Agent-driven discovery is challenging the traditional assumption that a human is always behind the search. This session explores how merchants can evolve from optimizing for search engines to optimizing for generative and agentic discovery. We'll examine the role of identity, intent signals, and trust as brands prepare for a customer journey increasingly mediated by AI agents.

Most technology strategies were tuned for a world with some level of predictability: human buyers, predictable routing, issuers who read traffic the way they always have. As the world of retail becomes increasingly complex, the gap between what's worked in the past and what will take you to the future are starting to surface- in the rise of AI/agents, shifting buyer relationships/expectations, alternative payment methods, in how issuers approve this new traffic. In this table topic, a retail leader who's already re-architecting for it opens with the approach they're taking, then the table gets into specifics: what's working, and what everyone's still figuring out.

You have terms and conditions for your customers - you don't yet have them for the software shopping on their behalf. Almost no one does: the trust hierarchies, rules of engagement, and governance frameworks for agentic interactions are still being written from scratch. The hard question underneath it all: when an agent shows up acting on behalf of a customer, what do you let it do - and who decides? A merchant opens with where they've landed, then the table digs in: what an agent can do unsupervised, where a human stays in the loop, and how you write rules for something no one's defined yet.

Everyone knows the usual abuse culprits- the promo, returns, and loyalty abuse that chips away at margins. The harder part is what to actually do about it without impacting the experience for genuine customers. This working session skips the diagnosis and gets straight to tactics. A merchant opens up the discussion with the moves they're making to catch abuse earlier, then the table works through the real trade-off underneath all of it: how far you can tighten controls before the friction costs you more than the abuse does. Bring the abuse pattern you haven't cracked, because someone else at the table has probably fought it.

By popular demand, we'll be hosting vertical-specific tables alongside our use-case tables - giving merchants a chance to connect with direct peers in their space. Choose from: Apparel, Accessories & Beauty; Growth Merchants; and Retail Distribution & Marketplaces.

Join us after the program for bites and beverages at City Vineyard - one of New York's most scenic outdoor spots, right on the Hudson River with skyline views.