{"id":42158,"date":"2025-07-28T08:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T08:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/42158\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T08:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T08:06:08","slug":"visa-gears-up-to-lead-the-agentic-ai-commerce-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/42158\/","title":{"rendered":"Visa Gears Up to Lead the Agentic AI Commerce Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

All transactions, whether eCommerce<\/a> or in brick-and-mortar<\/a> settings, happen in a merchant\u2019s environment.<\/p>\n

Click a buy button, or present a card at the register, and the conversion from browsing to buying is complete.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a new wrinkle. It\u2019s a semi-intelligent middleman, so to speak, that abstracts away some of the complexity for merchants\u2019 customers. Artificial intelligence<\/a> agents will reshape how consumers discover and make purchases, moving beyond what PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster<\/a> has termed the familiar \u201csearch, scroll, click and buy\u201d paradigm to a more intuitive \u201csay it and get it\u201d experience, all in a matter of seconds.<\/p>\n

As a result, we\u2019ll see a re-architecture of the entire commerce ecosystem, Rubail Birwadker<\/a>, senior vice president and global head of growth at Visa<\/a>, told Webster.<\/p>\n

\u201cMerchants spend an enormous amount of money getting noticed and getting their brand out there,\u201d he said as part of the \u201cBuilt to Buy\u201d series focused on the next frontier of AI. \u201cTraditional things like ads don\u2019t really work, so how do they get their brands differentiated in an agentic world?\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s some urgency in answering those questions, given that agents offer an advantage that most commerce marketplaces don\u2019t: context.<\/p>\n

Merchants will need to adapt, Birwadker said, adding that by the end of 2024, ChatGPT<\/a> was doing about the same amount of Google<\/a> searches as Google itself was doing in 2009, and it took only two years for the model and its users to get to that point.<\/p>\n

Visa\u2019s architectural imperative, therefore, is to ensure its global, multimarket, multichannel ecosystem can accommodate this next frontier of consumer interaction and transaction.<\/p>\n

The Automagical Experience<\/p>\n

Visa\u2019s approach to agentic commerce is grounded in the company\u2019s core mission, which is providing an \u201cautomagical experience\u201d linking merchants, consumers and issuers, Birwadker said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have 4.5 billion cardholders, 200 million merchants and 14,500 financial institutions around the world, and when you have a Visa card in your wallet,\u201d no matter where one might be in more than 200 countries around the globe, \u201cthe card works exactly the same way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Visa has been through decades of shifts, from physical commerce to eCommerce, mobile commerce, app-based commerce and social commerce, he said.<\/p>\n

For enterprises, the ability to tailor offerings more precisely to individual consumer preferences represents a leap forward in optimizing the merchant-customer relationship, if the right infrastructure is in place for the agents to make purchases on behalf of the cardholders.<\/p>\n

The ideal is a \u201cnative\u201d payment experience seamlessly integrated within the AI platform itself, simplifying the consumer journey and driving higher engagement, Birwadker said.<\/p>\n

Navigating Concerns: Fraud, Liability and the Early Stages<\/p>\n

Such streamlined commerce brings with it a new layer of technical<\/a> complexity and a range of concerns for various ecosystem participants, from merchants and issuers to the agents themselves.<\/p>\n

Merchants are worried about whether they\u2019ll have a playing field comparable to larger competitors; fraud <\/a>is a consistent concern. Where once eCommerce was about keeping fraudsters out, \u201cthe next era is that you\u2019ve \u2026 got to let the good [customers] in,\u201d Birwadker said.<\/p>\n

The technological challenge, coupled with the need for standardization, becomes paramount as merchants consider how to interact with agents, ensuring that authenticated tokens from platforms like Visa are recognized and integrated to access pricing and inventory.<\/p>\n

The industry is still in the nascent stages of integrating agentic AI into commerce. The payments piece of agentic commerce \u201cis not super sophisticated yet, and there are very good reasons for it,\u201d Birwadker said.<\/p>\n

There is inherent complexity in payments, which deals with people\u2019s money and requires strict adherence to laws, trust and security<\/a>, he said. However, the pace of AI adoption has been underestimated, suggesting that while \u201cwe are in the very early part of the bell curve on this one,\u201d the acceleration could be \u201crelatively rapid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Central to Visa\u2019s approach are specific frameworks and guardrails designed to manage risk and enhance the user experience, while keeping personal information out of the reach of fraudsters. This strategy builds on learnings from past innovations like mobile payments (e.g., Apple Pay<\/a> and Google Pay<\/a>), where \u201conce you get past the provisioning stage, generally there is very little to no fraud,\u201d he said. That\u2019s because card usage is linked to a specific app, agent or device, and biometrics narrow the surface area that\u2019s open to attack.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are also a number of pain points that we\u2019re addressing\u201d for issuers, Birwadker said, to make sure that authentication protocols are stepped up when appropriate. The agent community and payment processors also share concerns, particularly regarding liability in cases where an agent makes an error.<\/p>\n

Birwadker posed a scenario that\u2019s still a work in progress: \u201cI asked for a blue bag, and the agent got me a black bag\u2026 How does that work through our dispute process? How does compelling evidence work in that case?\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking ahead, a key challenge for agent developers, and an additional area for Visa\u2019s focus, is scalability. Birwadker said there is a common concern from developers, who inform the payments giant that, \u201c\u2018I have 20% or 25% of my users in the United States. How would this work in Europe? How would this work in India?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Against that backdrop, network standards might offer a path toward global operability and consistency.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Visa views agentic commerce as a material channel that will complement existing commerce modalities rather than replace them, just as eCommerce did not eliminate physical commerce, Birwadker said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe simplest way to think about our vision of agentic commerce is just going back to basics \u2026 the automagical experience is the same, from the promise of the Visa brand to the actual payment experience,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All transactions, whether eCommerce or in brick-and-mortar settings, happen in a merchant\u2019s environment. Click a buy button, or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,20101,33885,3,3300,33886,7600,7270,74,1977,1350],"class_list":["post-42158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-main-feature","tag-monday-conversation","tag-news","tag-pymnts-news","tag-pymnts-tv","tag-retail","tag-security","tag-technology","tag-video","tag-visa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}