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).