Today Visa provided products, partnerships and demonstrations of “Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI to find and buy”. This is a very significant effort from Visa that extends their leadership as the payment and identity infrastructure of the internet, to new era of AI and Agentic Commerce. 

What is the new problems it is solving? Payments geeks understand Card Present (CP) and Card Not Present (CNP) transactions, but agents raise the question of WHO authorized the agent and for what purpose?  Visa solves this problem by extending existing facilities like tokenization and FIDO based authentication, with agents receiving finer-grained authorization (from consumer) using limited-use tokens that restrict authorization and consumer control (expiration/time, amount and merchant).   

Within an agentic transaction flow, authentication by the Agent operator is not good enough for the merchant that will bear the risk in the transaction, the merchant must also be able to authenticate the consumer and obtain authorization for the transaction (see Tokens and Binding 101 and Separating Payments and Identity).

Where Mastercard tried to steal Visa’s big news with yesterday’s conceptual “Agent Pay” announcement containing a stunted array of partnerships with IBM and Microsoft (and no demos), Visa put together the “A team” of partnerships from OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic Stripe, IBM and others with demonstrations. Visa is clearly the leader here in product, partnerships and execution. 

Product Announcements From Visa

Visa Intelligent Commerce brings a suite of integrated APIs and a commercial partner program to AI platforms, enabling developers to deploy Visa’s AI commerce capabilities securely and at scale.

Visa Intelligent Commerce offers:

• AI-Ready Cards: Replaces card details with tokenized digital credentials, enhancing security for consumers and simplifying payment processes for developers. They confirm that a consumer’s chosen agent is allowed to act on a consumer’s behalf and bring identity verification to AI commerce. Only the consumer can instruct the agent on what to do and when to activate a payment credential.
• AI-Powered Personalization: The consumer is in control. Consumers share basic Visa spend and purchase insights with their consent to improve agent performance and personalize shopping recommendations. 
• Simple and Secure AI Payments: Allows consumers to easily set spending limits and conditions, providing clear guidelines for agent transactions. Commerce signals are shared in real-time with Visa, enabling Visa to effect transaction controls and help to manage disputes.

(Pics Below)

Take Away

Per last week’s blog, Commercial Models for AI Agents, the economic model of AI and Agentic Commerce is far from settled, but in every model payment network services associated with authentication, authorization and payment are needed. While agentic commerce is not likely to incrementally grow total eCom sales, it may further accelerate the shift from in-store transactions.  For Visa Agentic provides a signficant growth opportunity for VAS in tokenization, authentication and authorization.

Issuers have typically controlled how their cards are tokenized, this is why tokenized transaction obtain improved authorization. While there may be some Issuer concerns over increased network VAS, I don’t see another way, this agentic problem must be solved at a network level for product, rules, and operations. In the end, Banks want to enable their cards to operate in the support of their consumers. 

The bigger hurdle may be merchants, with top eCom merchants at the MRC taking the position that “tokens are a trap”. Furthermore, merchants are not jumping for joy at the thought of enabling Agentic operators to further disintermediate them.   The biggest near-term opportunity for agentic may be in long-tail merchants (ie, share local inventory information for hyperlocal CX) and commodity purchases like Travel.  

How to use AI to provide a better CX? Everyone cares about the answer here. I’m of the belief that Big Tech will be later to the agentic game, but will take over as their existing economic models,  ad networks, CMO sales relationships, analytics and measurement facilities and data advantages take hold.  See Medium – Google Is Winning on Every AI Front, and Agentic Commerce Predictions.

The good news for Visa is that they “win” in every model.