- Visa launched Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC), a global initiative enabling AI agents to complete purchases autonomously using existing payment infrastructure.
- Over 100 partners worldwide are building on VIC, with live pilots in the United States through Skyfire, Nekuda, PayOS, and Ramp.
- Visa’s open Trusted Agent Protocol lets merchants distinguish legitimate AI agents from bots, with Akamai integrating the protocol into its behavioral intelligence and fraud controls.
- Global expansion to Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East is planned throughout 2026.
What Happened
Visa announced the full-scale rollout of Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC), a platform designed to let AI agents initiate and complete purchases on behalf of consumers. The company said it has already processed hundreds of secure, agent-initiated transactions through VIC during pilot testing, marking what Visa describes as the transition from assisted shopping to autonomous purchasing.
Rubail Birwadker, SVP of Growth Products and Partnerships at Visa, framed the shift in direct terms: “In 2026, AI agents won’t just assist your shopping — they will complete your purchases.” Birwadker described 2025 as the final year of independent consumer shopping, with mainstream AI agent-driven payments launching across Visa’s network in 2026.
The platform builds on work that began in 2025 and is now moving into consumer deployment across multiple markets. Visa has enrolled more than 100 partners globally, with 30-plus building in the VIC sandbox and over 20 agents and enablers integrating directly with the payment rails.
Why It Matters
AI agents that can browse, compare, and buy products autonomously need payment infrastructure that can verify their identity, authorize transactions, and prevent fraud. Without that plumbing, agentic commerce stays theoretical. The core challenge is trust: a merchant needs to know that an AI agent placing an order has legitimate authority to spend, and a consumer needs to know that their payment credentials are not being exposed or misused in automated transactions.
Visa is positioning VIC as that plumbing. The company cited survey data showing 47% of U.S. shoppers already use AI for shopping tasks such as product research and price comparison. Visa expects millions to use AI agents for actual purchases by the 2026 holiday season, making reliable and secure payment rails a prerequisite rather than a luxury. The scale of Visa’s existing network — accepted at tens of millions of merchant locations globally — gives VIC a distribution advantage that standalone fintech solutions would struggle to replicate.
Technical Details
The system relies on Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, an open framework introduced in October 2025. It is built on existing web infrastructure and allows merchants to distinguish legitimate AI agents from malicious bots or scrapers. Rather than requiring merchants to adopt new authentication systems, the protocol layers onto their current Visa integration. Akamai has integrated the protocol with its behavioral intelligence and fraud detection systems, adding another layer of verification at the network edge.
VIC connects AI agents to Visa’s token infrastructure, allowing agents to carry payment credentials without exposing raw card numbers. The architecture reuses Visa’s existing tokenization layer rather than creating a parallel system, which reduces integration friction for merchants already on Visa’s network. Each agent-initiated transaction passes through the same authorization and fraud-scoring pipeline as a standard card transaction, with additional metadata identifying the agent and its authorization scope.
Who’s Affected
Several pilots are live in the United States. Skyfire is enabling a Consumer Reports agent to purchase Bose headphones on behalf of users. Nekuda is routing fashion recommendations through the Gensmo app to Fabrique checkout. PayOS is powering a BeyondStyle agent for checkout at Jomashop. Ramp is running a B2B automation pilot with cashback capabilities, extending the model beyond consumer shopping into enterprise procurement.
For consumers, the immediate impact depends on merchant adoption and whether their preferred retailers integrate Trusted Agent Protocol support. For payment processors and fintech companies, Visa’s early move sets a standard that competitors will need to match or build interoperability with. Merchants who do not support agent-based checkout risk losing transactions as AI-assisted purchasing scales through the holiday season and beyond.
What’s Next
Visa plans to expand VIC pilots to Asia Pacific and Europe in early 2026, Latin America and the Caribbean throughout the year, and the Middle East through a partnership with UAE-based Aldar for real estate payments. The main constraint remains merchant-side integration. Visa has the network reach and tokenization infrastructure, but each retailer and payment processor needs to implement Trusted Agent Protocol support before agents can transact on their platforms. Until that adoption reaches critical mass, AI agent commerce will remain limited to the specific merchants participating in pilots.
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