You wake up to find your fridge restocked, your next flight upgraded, and your streaming subscriptions adjusted — all without lifting a finger. An AI agent has been working for you overnight, finding deals, securing purchases, and making pre-approved decisions on your behalf. This is the era of agentic commerce, and its reshaping how we live our lives in real time. In this new era of commerce, true trust comes from a new equation: empowering the consumer, securing the transaction, and verifying the agent.
A New Era in Commerce
The traditional path of searching, comparing, and buying is gradually being replaced by AI agents. These agents now seek, select, purchase, and manage transactions end-to-end, moving us beyond the old “hunt and peck” online experience toward automation, personalization, and true frictionlessness.
AI is rapidly becoming an advisor and filter for consumers and is driving significant behavioral shifts. For example, in the U.S. AI-driven traffic to retail websites surged over 4,700% year-over-year from generative AI sources in July 2025¹.
The Merchant Opportunity — and the Trust Challenge
For merchants, agentic commerce is both an opportunity and a challenge. It creates a level playing field, where an AI agent can instantly surface the merchant offering the best combination of price, speed, and configuration, democratising discovery and customer acquisition.
But it also requires merchants to distinguish between malicious bots and authorised agents acting on a consumer’s behalf. Blocking the former protects the business; blocking the latter forfeits a sale.
The Pillars of Trust in Agentic Commerce
In commerce, trust starts with payments. That’s where Visa comes in. We have been using AI to protect the ecosystem for over 30 years, analyzing over 200 billion transactions a year and 500 data elements in every transaction to stop fraud in real time². This includes a $3 billion investment in AI and data infrastructure over the last decade alone³.
Now, we are bringing that deep expertise to this new era with Visa Intelligent Commerce, building a multi-layered trust framework for agentic commerce, focusing on what matters most to the consumer.
- Safeguarding consumer control: We put consumers in control, letting them set clear rules and limits for every transaction — for example, “Buy these shoes, but don’t spend over 100 USD.” Visa’s network cross-checks each agent-initiated purchase in real time, proactively managing controls and disputes from the start.
- Enhanced payment security: We’re evolving our core foundational security technologies to protect consumers in a world where online fraud is seven times higher than in-person. Tokenization replaces card details with unique, agent-bound digital tokens — so only authorized agents can transact, reducing fraud and boosting transparency. Visa Payment Passkey further streamlines authentication, using biometrics such as fingerprint or face scans for secure, password-free approval.
- Agent verification: Consumer confidence relies on ecosystem-wide data protection. Our "Know Your Agent" (KYA) process vets trusted AI partners to ensure consumers know who acts on their behalf. For merchants, the Visa Trusted Agent Protocol — built upon the foundational HTTP Message Signature standard, and aligned with Web Both Auth — enables quick, secure verification of agents with minimal system changes. This embeds trust through secure intent signaling, customer recognition, and data exchange across agentic commerce.
Powering the Ecosystem at Global Scale
Our strategy is one of evolution, not revolution. We are making targeted upgrades to VisaNet that allow us to move at the speed of AI innovation while maintaining the stability our partners rely on. This includes assigning distinct transaction identifiers for agent‑initiated purchases so banks can apply adapted risk rules, and creating agent‑bound tokens tied to specific authorised agents with consumer consent for maximum transparency and security.
We are also partnering with leading AI innovators including OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Mistral⁴, alongside our 14,500 financial institution partners and 150 million merchant locations, to ensure the ecosystem benefits from secure, responsible AI driven agentic commerce.
Pioneering an Agentic Commerce Future
Gartner predicts that by 2028, 15 percent of daily consumer decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents⁵. Preparing for this requires proactive consumer-centric design and collaboration across the ecosystem.
For six decades, Visa has built its brand on enabling trust in commerce. Today, we are extending that role into the next era, providing the secure infrastructure, intelligence, and partnerships to make agentic commerce faster, smarter, and inherently safe.
¹ Source: Adobe Data Insights, August 2025, Growth in AI-driven visit share
⁴ https://corporate.visa.com/en/products/intelligent-commerce.html