Visa Embracing Agentic Commerce With New Protocol

Since the beginning of the modern Internet architecture, the premise of e-commerce and the online economy has been relatively consistent: ads, search, or social media bring traffic to a website/app, and the customers browse until they find something of value to them, to buy/subscribe/follow/etc.

This might change soon with the rise of AI. Instead of just relying on an automated system for discovery in response to human-written search, people might soon rely on AI agents to perform tasks for them, including online purchases, completely changing our approach to digital interactions.

As today, a lot, if not much, of items and services are bought online, this could radically change how our economies will be structured in the future.

Source: ARK Invest

This represents a major shift for not only e-commerce platforms, but also payment systems, as they need to now process orders and associated risks from not just humans, but AI agents as well.

We already discussed this exact topic in detail in our article “The $8 Trillion Shift to AI Agentic Commerce“, and more broadly, the impact of AI agents in “Agentic AI: The Next Trillion-Dollar Efficiency Play”.

So this has quickly become a major topic of interest, as well as concern for companies like Visa, which processes most of the world’s payments through its network of payments and credit cards. These companies are recently changing fast, with, for example, Visa’s competitor Mastercard making an aggressive move into the adoption of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins.

This represents an important change, in line with how most financial institutions are now, after years of resistance and dragging their feet, fully embracing new financial technologies.

Visa’s Vision For The Agentic Era

In a publication from March 17th 2026, Jack Forestell, the Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa, explained his and the company’s views about AI agents. He detailed that their strategy is articulated around four pillars.

Source: Visa

The first pillar is that AI agents will reduce friction in purchases. Slow websites, unclear instructions, or simply a loss of attention of a human purchaser will be less impactful with agents, so the success rate of potential purchases will rise.

“When success rates rise, volumes rise — benefiting everyone from consumers and merchants to issuers and the broader ecosystem.”

Another one is part of a long-term trend of smaller and smaller transactions, helped by the disappearance or lowering of fixed fees over the past decade. Another factor was the rise of subscription, with, for example, a software that would have previously been bought in one transaction worth hundreds of dollars now replaced by smaller monthly transactions.

“Agents will accelerate this trend — breaking purchases into smaller transactions and enabling consumption to be priced in hours, minutes, or even seconds rather than months or years.”

Another trend, which might be even more important than B2C adoption of agentic AI for e-commerce, is the process of payment in B2B transactions. To this day, payment of invoices between companies is a very slow and inefficient process, often requiring days or even weeks of email exchanges of quotes, billing data, authorization, signatures, etc. This could all change when AI agents are empowered to make decisions, especially in the case of secured and already validated relationships, or for what are today labor-intensive tasks, like onboarding new partners.

“Agents can remove friction across supplier onboarding, invoicing, reconciliation, and payment execution — accelerating digitization at scale.”

Finally, Visa expects AI agents and AI in general to impact the broader economy. More efficient transactions and more intelligent and automated decision-making will increase productivity. As such, economic growth will essentially “raise all boats” and boost the volume of transactions, which is ultimately the main source of growth for middlemen like Visa.

“The efficiency gains from agentic systems have the potential to meaningfully expand global GDP — and when GDP grows, the payments ecosystem grows with it.”

This is now an urgent topic to address for Visa, as AI agents are experiencing one of the fastest technology adoption curves ever, potentially making them a lot more disruptive than the comparatively slower adoption of the Internet by PC users several decades ago.

Source: ARK Invest

Building Payments For AI Agents

Setting The Right Protocol

Visa is positioning itself to embrace the shift to AI agents performing many, or maybe even most, of online purchases. And to be fair, the company has indeed been one of the pillars of making online purchases mainstream, providing the digital and legal infrastructures to connect the nascent Internet to traditional banks.

“When you look at our history, we built foundational technologies across every phase of commerce when complexity and risk increased, and have continuously adapted our technology. We created new authorization methods in eCommerce and increased security with tokens in mobile commerce.”

This could, however, become a quickly crowded space, with AI companies rushing to develop their own standard that will enable safer use of AI agents. For example, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024. Or the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), developed by Stripe and OpenAI.

Over the past year, AI-driven traffic to retail websites in the United States surged over 4,700%, and 85% of shoppers who have used AI to shop say it improved their shopping experience.

This is why Visa is catching up and developing its own “Visa Intelligent Commerce and Trusted Agent Protocol”, with a goal to build better agentic processes on top of Visa’s trusted infrastructure.

Visa’s Agent Protocol Strategy

The goal of Visa’s agent protocol is to provide a ready-to-use system that can be almost instantly scaled up, leveraging its inherent advantages of already owning a large chunk of the world’s payment ecosystem.

Ultimately, the important part will be for Visa to convince AI companies and developer to use primarily its protocol, or at least make their agent compatible with it, so it becomes a recognized and well-established standard in the industry.

“ If you’re building a commerce agent, you want your agent to act on behalf of your consumer, adapted to their preferences. You aren’t going with something experimental. You will look for payment methods that offer reach, security, and trust — Visa’s core strengths.”

In this vision, Visa will be instrumental in not only facilitating but also speeding up the adoption of payment via AI agents. This is because the company, faithful to its roots and its established reputation, is putting a lot of focus on reliability and safety over just the users’ experience.

“We believe the entire payments ecosystem has a responsibility to ensure sellers can trust AI agents as much as they trust their best customers and networks,”

Visa’s Agent Protocol Explained

Visa is tackling the problem of deploying an AI agent in payment from both sides.

On one end, the protocol needs to manage websites and payment bot detection systems, as until recently any automated activity was a priori considered nefarious, and make them distinguish real threats from legitimate agentic transactions.

On the other end, it needs to support agent-driven guest and logged-in checkout and make sure the consumer can still understand, control, and have visibility over what their agents are doing.

“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.”

Another important element is making the implementation of this protocol as easy as possible, as many sellers might not be familiar with or trustful of agents. Ideally, this will be using existing web infrastructure and requiring minimal user experience (UX) changes.

“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.”

The system will use agent-specific cryptographic signatures that include key information:

• Agent Intent: the indication that the agent wants to retrieve additional details about, or purchase, a specific product from a merchant.
• Consumer Recognition: the data indicating whether the consumer has an existing account or has previously interacted with the merchant.
• Payment Information: Do the agents have the capability to work with a merchant’s preferred checkout or payment method?

The system will not work in opposition to other protocols, but as a part of a growing ecosystem of solutions that both compete and complement each other.

“We are committed to aligning closely with global standards bodies like IETF, OpenID Foundation and EMVCo. We are working closely with our ecosystem partners to ensure that Trusted Agent Protocol will complement other recently announced protocols like the Agentic Commerce Protocol, and are collaborating with Coinbase to align on interoperability with x402.”

Most likely, agentic e-commerce will be one among several revolutions in how transactions and money will work in the near future. Another trend will be the adoption of cryptocurrency stablecoins, tokenisation, and blockchain technology in general.

To learn about the synergies of blockchain and agentic AI, and how e-commerce companies like Alibaba (BABA -3.61%) are quickly pushing this shift, you can read our article “How Tokenization and Agentic Pay Will Transform Payments”.

Investing In Visa

Payment networks like Visa and Mastercard are often seen by investors as old, established, and “safe/boring” companies, especially when compared to more aggressive and newer fintech companies.

However, this is only true for their ongoing operations, which indeed have the virtue of being very stable and providing a steady cash flow. But Visa is also embracing new technology at a quick pace, aware that any resistance or delays would just lead it to become the Kodak of payment systems.

For example, Visa is embracing USDC stablecoins on blockchain networks for near-instant cross-border settlement. Or it provides its customers stablecoin-linked credit cards, and is enabling crypto-to-fiat conversion for spending at over 130 million merchant locations.

The company has already been processing $3.5B in stablecoin settlements as of late 2025.

Visa also invested in companies like BVNK, providing crypto B2B services, which was recently acquired by its rival Mastercard for $1.8B.

The next step of financial innovation for Visa is the possibility of programmable money. This is supported by the effort in agentic AI and the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP), which helps for programmable lines of credit or smart contract automation, with banks like Argentinian BBVA already piloting these capabilities.

Overall, a decade ago, Visa was at risk of being considered a relic of a bygone era where payments had to pass through a few monopoly actors gouging fees from their customers, and instead being replaced by innovative fintech and cryptocurrencies.

Today, its competitive position is very different, and it is positioned to not just survive, but thrive in this new environment.

However, like for Mastercard, more efficient transactions could also be a downside, as it might force the company to accept lower fees, durably reducing its profitability and margins, as keeping its previous fee levels would leave it open to attacks by cheaper, more efficient new crypto competitors. So the end result might be neutral, with the profits from more transactions by agents potentially neutralized by compressed margins.

Latest Visa (V) Stock News and Developments