Visa Intelligent Commerce: AI Agents Shop for You (But Only on Authorized Sites)
When AI emerged from the labs and began to spread to the general public, many raised a question: since AI agents can recommend products and services, when will people trust them enough to delegate the entire purchasing process? Today, in 2026, it is already possible to do so, and safely.
How? With Visa Intelligent Commerce, a portfolio of initiatives launched by Visa that allows Visa credit card holders to make secure transactions, adhering to user-imposed parameters, across a range of participating sites.
Visa Intelligent Commerce: When AI Suggests, Chooses, and Purchases
At the Visa Payments Forum in Paris, Visa announced the availability in Europe of a service that enables AI agents not only to suggest products and services but also to purchase them directly, requesting only authorization from the cardholder before proceeding with the transaction.
Currently, these agents can make purchases at approximately 30 merchants who have joined the initiative, including lastminute.com, Frasers, Cleverbridge, and BrickDepot.
But how do merchants understand who is making a purchase between a user, any bot, or a verified AI agent? Here come into play the Trusted Agent Protocol and Agent Directory, tools that provide merchants with guarantees about the agent's identity, thus distinguishing authorized interactions from unverified traffic and deciding how these systems can access catalogs, display products, and proceed to the transaction.
A notable point is that adoption does not require overhauling the infrastructure: TAP can be integrated into frameworks already used for risk management, policy, and user experience, working alongside existing or emerging commercial protocols. Support from operators like Cloudflare and Akamai also shifts the topic to an infrastructural scale, as it allows these functionalities to be integrated into the technical layer upon which many e-commerce sites rely.
Visa Payment Passkeys: Ensuring the Security of Agentic Purchases
For banks and card-issuing institutions, payments initiated by AI agents pass through Visa Payment Passkeys. This technology authenticates the cardholder, links each transaction to explicit user instructions, and ensures compliance with European Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements. The agent can then initiate the transaction, but control remains with the consumer, who must always provide final confirmation. In the Agentic Ready program, Visa has used Payment Passkeys to secure operations and provide card issuers and merchants with guarantees on the approval, processing, and traceability of agentic payments.
AI Agents Buying for Us: A Benefit or Just a Potential Danger?
Can we trust allowing an AI agent the freedom to purchase on our behalf? Given how Visa's system is structured today, which requires confirmation before executing any transaction, the risk seems limited. The question is whether it truly makes sense, today, to delegate even these tasks to an AI agent.
The answer is not trivial and depends significantly on how each person uses AI. For instance, if someone uses a chatbot to help plan a vacation, including flights, hotels, and restaurant reservations, they might be tempted to entrust the payment phase to the chatbot as well. The advantage isn't just saving a couple of clicks, but the ability, for example, to allow the AI agent to constantly scan various offers to purchase at the most opportune moment when the price drops below a certain threshold defined by the user.
The same logic applies to regular purchases from e-commerce: are we buying shoes, a graphics card, or a new TV? Having an agent continue to search until the price drops to a considered favorable level saves a lot of time. It can also prevent the risk of losing an offer because at that moment one was occupied and unable to personally proceed with the purchase.
Convenient and, considering the parameters set by Visa, also reasonably secure. However, one cannot help but wonder how the landscape of e-commerce will change with the world of agentic AI: if today the e-commerce market is sometimes distorted by scalpers, what might be the impact of AI on the ecosystem, on prices, and on availability?