Find and Buy with AI: Visa Unveils New Era of Commerce

Visa has introduced Intelligent Commerce at its Global Product Drop event, opening its payment network to developers building AI agents that can search, recommend, and execute payments on behalf of consumers.

The initiative provides APIs and developer tools that enable AI agents to interact with Visa's payment infrastructure, handling the authentication, authorisation, and settlement of transactions initiated by autonomous software. Visa said the platform is designed to support the emerging model of AI-driven commerce where consumers delegate purchasing decisions to intelligent agents.

Intelligent Commerce addresses the same structural shift that Mastercard's Agent Pay targets: the growing capability of AI systems to act as purchasing agents for consumers. As AI assistants become more sophisticated, they need secure, standardised access to payment networks to complete transactions on behalf of their users.

Visa's approach emphasises developer accessibility, providing tools that make it straightforward for technology companies to integrate payment capabilities into their AI agents. The company said it wants to ensure that Visa is embedded into the AI commerce ecosystem from the earliest stages of its development.

The platform supports features including real-time product discovery, price comparison, and purchase execution, creating an end-to-end commerce experience that AI agents can navigate programmatically. Security controls ensure that all transactions meet Visa's authentication and fraud prevention standards.

The launch signals that both major card networks now view agentic commerce as a strategic priority, investing in the infrastructure needed to ensure that AI-driven purchasing flows through their payment networks rather than bypassing them.