Agentic commerce
Agent gateway
An agent gateway is the control plane through which AI agents act on a live system, enforcing scopes, idempotency, audit logging and human approval on irreversible actions.
It exists because the protocols that let an agent act specify none of these things. MCP defines discovery and invocation; it is silent on who may call what, what happens when the same call arrives twice, and how you reconstruct afterwards what an agent did.
The four controls are not independent nice-to-haves. Scopes without audit means you cannot investigate; audit without idempotency means your log faithfully records the double charge; and an approval gate is the only one of the four that prevents a mistake rather than explaining it.
In depth: Can AI agents run an ecommerce store?