Visa Prepares Merchants for AI at the Checkout

Visa is on track to offer artificial intelligence-enabled commerce to consumers within months and expects that millions of consumers will be using AI agents to complete purchases by the end of 2026.

The company said this Thursday (Dec. 18) while announcing that it and several partners have successfully completed hundreds of agent-initiated transactions.

“This holiday season marks the end of an era,” Rubail Birwadker, senior vice president, head of growth products and partnerships at Visa, said in a Thursday press release. “In 2026, AI agents won’t just assist your shopping — they will complete your purchases, powered by Visa’s global scale, standards leadership and unparalleled commitment to secure agentic commerce.”

This progress toward agentic commerce builds on the Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC) initiative launched earlier this year, as well as Visa’s work with more than 100 partners around the world, according to the release.

More than 30 partners are building within the VIC sandbox, more than 20 agents and agent enablers are integrating directly with VIC, and hundreds of controlled, real-world agent-initiated consumer and B2B transactions have been completed, the release said.

Visa unveiled Visa Intelligent Commerce in April, saying the program opens the network’s rails to developers building AI agents that search, recommend and pay on behalf of consumers.

“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, global head of consumers products at Visa, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview posted in April.

In October, Visa introduced the Trusted Agent Protocol, a tool created in partnership with Worldpay and Cloudflare and designed to allow secure communication between merchants and AI agents.

“For the past year, we’ve worked closely with sellers, issuers and partners to make sure agent-initiated transactions are as seamless and secure as any payment today,” Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said at the time in a press release. “Our new agent protocol is focused on creating no-code functionality for merchants to securely identify agents with an intent to buy and provide a better payment and personalized experience for its known users.”