Visa Aims to Give Businesses Agentic Commerce On-Ramp

Visa has introduced a tool designed to help businesses take part in AI-powered commerce.

Intelligent Commerce Connect, part of the Visa Intelligence Commerce program, serves as a “network, protocol, and token vault-agnostic ‘on ramp’ to agentic commerce for agent builders, merchants, and enablers,” Visa said in a Wednesday (April 8) news release.

The company said the new offering aims to help businesses meet rising consumer use of artificial intelligence (AI) agents for making purchases, allowing for payment initiation, tokenization, spend controls and authentication through an integration with Visa Acceptance Platform.

The solution integrates Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs, used to process agent purchases using Visa cards, as well as other networks’ APIs, letting agents pay with Visa and non-Visa cards.

“From small businesses to the world’s biggest retailers, Visa powers how people pay every day, millions of times over,” said Andrew Torre, president of value‑added services at Visa. “Intelligent Commerce Connect brings that same, trusted payment acceptance infrastructure into the emerging world of AI-driven commerce, so businesses can let AI agents buy on behalf of consumers, securely and at scale.”

Visa says the tool is now being piloted with a select group of partners, including AWS, Diddo, Highnote, Mesh, Payabli and Sumvin, with more to be added later in the year.

Visa debuted the Intelligence Commerce program last year, opening its rails to developers building AI agents that search, recommend and pay on behalf of consumers.

As noted here at the time, the stakes are substantial, with generative AI platforms influencing what people buy. The missing link, PYMTS wrote, is a payment mechanism invisible to consumers and accepted by merchants.

“This is going to transform shopping and buying — we’re letting AI developers and engineers use the Visa network to allow AI agents to find, and buy, on [the consumer’s] behalf in a seamless and safe way,” Mark Nelsen, Visa’s global head of consumer products, said in interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster before the launch.

Meanwhile, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research commissioned by Visa Acceptance Solutions finds that a growing share of acquirers now believe the foundational infrastructure for agentic commerce has already been built.

Almost 80% of surveyed acquirers said they are at least somewhat ready to support seamless omnichannel shopping experiences, a requirement for any system where autonomous agents transact across digital and physical environments.

“This could represent a notable shift,” PYMNTS wrote. “Payments modernization has historically lagged behind consumer-facing innovation, constrained by legacy systems and regulatory complexity. Yet the current moment suggests a reversal: the rails are largely built, and the conversation is now moving from capability to execution.”