There is something in the air folks, first Amazon, then Mastercard and now Visa has unveiled a major strategic vision for the future of digital payments including agentic AI.
Visa launch agentic AI payments
The announcement was made at the company’s 2025 Global Product Drop in San Francisco, where Visa showcased how artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape the way consumers discover, shop, and pay.
The centrepiece of the announcement is Visa Intelligent Commerce, a new framework that opens Visa’s payment infrastructure to developers, engineers and AI platforms building next-generation commerce agents.
These AI agents will soon be empowered to browse, select and purchase goods on behalf of consumers — transforming traditional retail into a frictionless, hyper-personalised experience.
According to Visa CEO Ryan McInerney, the initiative builds on decades of investment in secure payments infrastructure.
“As new ways to pay emerge, they need to run on a network that is always on – that is safe, secure, scalable and relentlessly innovating,” he said.
“Visa is taking its global network and combining it with deep expertise to bring trust and security to AI-enabled commerce.”
Visa Agentic AI
Visa’s ambitions extend well beyond conceptual demos.
Intelligent Commerce is being rolled out with a full suite of APIs and a developer partner programme, enabling platforms like OpenAI, Stripe, Microsoft, and Samsung to integrate Visa’s payment rails directly into AI agents.
Consumers remain firmly in control, setting spending preferences and limits, while Visa’s authentication and tokenisation technology ensures every transaction is secure.
Among the technical innovations is the launch of AI-Ready Cards — digital credentials designed to be controlled by authorised AI agents.
These tokenised credentials not only secure payments but verify that an agent has been authorised to act on a consumer’s behalf.
The system is also capable of managing real-time transaction controls, dispute resolution and AI-powered shopping personalisation — leveraging consented spend insights to improve recommendations.
Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, likened the shift to AI commerce to previous inflection points such as the rise of online and mobile shopping.
“Just like the shift from physical shopping to online, and from online to mobile, Visa is setting a new standard for a new era of commerce,” he said.
Visa is also expanding its Flex Credential platform, which allows a single card to switch between debit, credit, and buy now, pay later (BNPL) functions.
A new partnership with Klarna will bring this innovation to the US and Europe, allowing consumers to access a seamless debit-to-BNPL experience for the first time.
In parallel, Visa announced new stablecoin-linked cards in collaboration with Stripe’s crypto arm, Bridge.
This will enable fintech developers to issue stablecoin Visa cards via a single API, helping extend programmable money use cases across global markets.
Visa is also trialling new products aimed at broadening access:
Visa Pay, connecting wallets to any Visa-accepting merchant globally.
Visa Accept, a tap-to-pay solution for micro-sellers using NFC-enabled smartphones.
With Intelligent Commerce, Visa is not merely responding to AI trends — it appears to be staking a claim to be the foundational infrastructure of an AI-powered global economy.
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