CEO Corner: AI agents are coming. Will financial services build walls or open doors?

Is agentic commerce the next wave (and will it impact financial services)? I’m personally spending almost a quarter of my own time on agentic commerce, and Achieve is leaning in.

But corporate America is splitting into two camps over AI agents shopping on behalf of consumers. Last week, the split went public and it’s wild to watch how polarizing this is.

Camp one is building walls. On last Tuesday's earnings call, JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said his company won't let just any outside AI agent operate inside customer accounts: "You don't want rogue agents, and there could be thousands of them."

Amazon went further. It blocked Meta's Muse agent (which I love, along with Instinct AI) from its marketplace in September, and it's been in court with Perplexity for nearly a year over its Comet shopping agent. In August, the Ninth Circuit overturned an injunction against Perplexity, finding that users—not Perplexity—were accessing Amazon through the tool.

Camp two is building doors. Rocket is working with Meta, Walmart, and Stripe on an open standard for how agents and businesses talk to each other. And in real estate, eXp Realty just went "MCP First, AI of Choice." Shopify just opened its catalog, over a billion listings, to any AI agent a shopper connects, no partnership required. Checkout stays on Shop Pay, and the buyer approves every purchase. Shopify chose a door. The door-builder camp is growing. At Achieve, we've already opened ours: any AI agent can connect to our MCP server at achieve.com/mcp and ask questions about our products across debt resolution, personal loans, home equity lines of credit (HELOCs), home loans and debt consolidation. Those questions are answered from a governed knowledge base, with sources cited and disclosures attached.

Here's the distinction the wall-builders are missing. The risk isn't agents. It's agents that have to impersonate your customer, scraping screens, storing passwords, because you never gave them a legitimate way in (so they hide and sneak around and get blocked and the consumer loses). A governed front door can address a concern Dimon is worried about: the agent identifies itself, the answers come from an official source, and nothing moves without the customer's own consent.

Consumers are going to shop through agents. That's not a prediction anymore; it's already happening. The only choice left for companies is whether those agents meet a wall, a lawsuit or a door with your name on it.