AI Agents Are Moving to the Front of the Checkout Line

As shoppers increasingly rely on AI assistants to search, compare and buy, the traditional customer journey is disappearing. Instead of typing into search bars, consumers are talking to trusted, permissioned bots—and those bots are making the buying decisions. This edition of the “Prompt Economy : When Bots Are the Customer,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa, explores how the rise of agentic AI is redefining the fundamentals of digital commerce. The tracker examines what it means to become “agent-ready” in an era when discovery, trust and checkout happen through conversations, not clicks.

Visa’s Intelligent Commerce initiative anchors this transformation, connecting tokenized payments, authentication and spending controls to new agentic APIs that allow AI assistants to act safely on behalf of their users. These technologies—built on Visa’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent Toolkit—represent the next phase of intelligent infrastructure: one where bots don’t just recommend products, but complete transactions in real time. PYMNTS Intelligence pairs Visa’s platform innovation with fresh examples from retailers like Bealls, New Generation and Albertsons, showing how early adopters are already capturing value from conversational commerce.

Inside “The Prompt Economy : When Bots Are the Customer,” learn how:

Agentic AI is transforming the customer journey from search to sale. As bots like Amazon’s Rufus and Walmart’s Sparky become digital concierges, merchants must make their data and policies readable by machines, not just people.

Visa’s Intelligent Commerce architecture is enabling secure, frictionless agentic payments. Tokenization and permissioned APIs are turning AI into trusted buyers, not just smart browsers.

Forward-thinking merchants are winning visibility and conversion in the prompt era. Structured data, machine-readable catalogs and tokenized checkout are redefining what it means to be open for business when bots are the customer.

Download the Tracker now to see how becoming agent-ready today will define who leads the next generation of digital commerce.

Download the Tracker The Prompt Economy : When Bots Are the Customer

About the Tracker

“The Prompt Economy : When Bots Are the Customer” is a PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa collaboration. Insights are based on proprietary research and data analysis examining agentic AI in commerce, payments and B2B workflows. It draws on PYMNTS’ ongoing market monitoring, case studies and expert interviews.