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Amex tells merchants to get agent-ready: ACE kit now integrating with OpenAI and other AI platforms

On the Q3 2026 call, CEO Steve Squeri said Amex is working with several leading AI companies to integrate its ACE developer kit — a direct signal to small merchants that AI-agent discoverability is a near-term customer-acquisition problem.

By Dario Vasquez·Deployments & incidents·

On the Q3 2026 earnings call Oct. 23, American Express CEO Steve Squeri told investors the company is “working with several leading AI companies on integrating ACE into their platforms to enable agent-powered transactions,” and is “deepening our partnership with OpenAI to continue bringing Amex card membership into ChatGPT,” including a planned Amex plugin that surfaces Amex Offers inside the chat interface. The ACE developer kit (Agentic Commerce Experiences), first announced in Q1 2026, is Amex’s bid to sit inside the agent layer rather than beneath it.

That’s the strategic read. The merchant read is sharper.

Three weeks earlier, Amex published its Business Playbook for Agentic Commerce alongside Trendex survey data: 66% of U.S. consumers say they’re likely to use AI agents to research prices in the next 12 months, and 62% of merchants expect agent-driven shopping to have a moderate or significant impact on their business within a year. Anna Marrs, Amex’s Group President of Global Merchant and Network Services, called it “the most significant change in shopping and purchasing behavior since the start of e-commerce.”

The mechanics matter. On Oct. 13, Amex layered its Intent Intelligence framework onto ACE, capturing a shopper’s purchase instructions, merchant preferences, and spending limits before an agent transacts (Digital Commerce 360 notes there are no live integrations yet). If an agent can’t parse a merchant’s product data, pricing, and availability, it routes the sale to a competitor it can parse. The organic-search playbook, with less patience.

Squeri conceded agentic transaction volumes “are still small, but the direction is clear.” It’s the same cadence as 1999’s e-commerce disclosures: small line item, large arrow. Small merchants have a narrow window to audit whether their catalogs are legible to agents before the holiday peak, a point we’ve made in the holiday-season AI discovery gap facing small businesses, in coverage of how AI assistants are deciding which small businesses get found, and in the “do you accept AI agents?” question now surfacing at the storefront.

Amex is building the rails. It isn’t going to make merchants legible for free.

Sources