Agentic Commerce: What Could We Learn from Visa’s Success?

Hundreds of secure AI-driven transactions have been completed by Visa and its partners across the commerce ecosystem.

The payments giant announced the milestone as part of its Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative, demonstrating that agent-initiated purchasing has transitioned from experimentation to live production environments.

Rubail Birwadker, SVP, Head of Growth Products & Partnerships at Visa, says: "We are seeing impressive progress in how AI will transform commerce, with many real-world transactions completed by Visa's deep network of partners.

"This holiday season marks the end of an era. In 2026, AI agents won't just assist your shopping – they will complete your purchases, powered by Visa's global scale, standards leadership and unparalleled commitment to secure agentic commerce."

Building global agentic infrastructure

Visa is working with more than 100 partners worldwide, with over 30 actively building within the VIC sandbox and over 20 agents and agent enablers integrating directly with Visa Intelligent Commerce.

The company recently partnered with Amazon Web Services to bring its Visa Intelligent Commerce platform to AWS Marketplace, aiming to support developers and large enterprise customers to build agentic commerce solutions.

Early pilots from agent-enabling partners including Skyfire, Nekuda, PayOS and Ramp are executing end-to-end consumer and B2B purchases in closed beta across the US.

Skyfire is enabling Consumer Reports' product recommendation agent to demonstrate purchases of Bose headphones via browser automation.

Nekuda is allowing fashion enthusiasts on Gensmo's app to move from AI-styled looks to purchase from Fabrique in a single tap via Rye's checkout API, whilst enabling Henry Labs to integrate one-click checkout into Price.com for purchases at Honeylove.

PayOS is providing BeyondStyle with payment infrastructure for agent-driven checkout with online retailer Jomashop.

Ramp is applying Visa Intelligent Commerce to its automation platform for B2B payments, streamlining corporate bill pay operations whilst allowing customers to capture cashback on card payments.

Global expansion and security standards

Visa has expanded its Intelligent Commerce framework to accelerate adoption of agentic commerce in additional markets around the globe.

In Asia Pacific and Europe, pilot programmes are anticipated to kick off in early 2026, whilst in Latin America and the Caribbean, Visa is ensuring readiness for consumers to make AI-driven purchases at top merchants in the region over the next year.

In the Middle East, Visa is working with Aldar to allow customers in the United Arab Emirates to use AI agents to easily pay repetitive fees like real estate service charges.

The company introduced the Trusted Agent Protocol in October 2025 alongside more than 10 partners, creating an open framework built on existing web infrastructure that enables safe agent-driven checkout.

The protocol helps merchants distinguish between malicious bots and legitimate AI agents acting on behalf of consumers.

Akamai has integrated with the protocol, combining its edge-based behavioural intelligence, user recognition, and bot and abuse protection with Visa's identity, authentication and fraud controls.

This allows merchants to confidently welcome AI agents with commerce intent into their digital storefronts.

The framework builds on Visa's three decades of AI leadership in secure payments and US$3bn invested in AI and data infrastructure over the past decade, primarily deployed for fraud prevention.

The company analyses more than 500 data points on up to 83,000 transactions per second and blocked over US$40bn in fraud in 2023 alone.

Market adoption accelerates

New Visa research indicates that nearly half of US shoppers now use AI tools for at least one shopping task, from price comparisons to personalised recommendations.

With AI-generated traffic surging across retail websites, Visa predicts that millions of consumers will use AI agents to complete purchases by the 2026 holiday season.

Recent partnerships such as the one between OpenAI and PayPal have demonstrated the technical architecture required for autonomous commerce within AI systems, with the Agentic Commerce Protocol defining how language models can interface with payment infrastructure, merchant databases and transaction processing systems.

Salesforce and Stripe have also integrated the Agentic Commerce Protocol to enable transactions initiated through AI agents, with Salesforce research indicating that 48% of consumers who currently use AI for shopping would allow an AI agent to complete a purchase on their behalf.

The technical implementation involves multiple layers where AI assistants interpret user requests and identify purchasing intent, translating this into structured queries against merchant catalogues.