Visa and Mastercard Launch AI Agent Payments for Smarter Commerce

Visa and Mastercard are entering the AI-driven commerce space with ambitious new technologies designed to enable intelligent agents to shop and make transactions securely on behalf of consumers.

Unveiled within a day of each other, Visa’s Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard’s Agent Pay mark the financial sector’s most significant moves yet toward integrating AI into everyday payment experiences. These tools promise to make AI-powered shopping more personalized, secure, and seamless.

Visa: Intelligent Commerce Opens Payments to AI Agents

Visa introduced Intelligent Commerce at its Global Product Drop, announcing a suite of APIs and a commercial partner program with developer tools that integrate its payment infrastructure with AI agents. These agents will act on behalf of consumers—browsing, selecting, and purchasing based on preset preferences and controls.

“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,” said Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell. “Now, with Visa Intelligent Commerce, AI agents can find, shop and buy for consumers based on their pre-selected preferences. Each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest.”

Key features include:

• AI-Ready Cards: These tokenized digital credentials replace traditional card details, enabling AI agents to act securely on a consumer’s behalf. Visa ensures that authorization is limited to the consumer’s designated AI agent, incorporating identity verification into the AI commerce flow. Only the consumer can instruct the agent to activate a payment credential—enhancing privacy and security, while also simplifying integration for developers building AI-powered platforms.
  

• AI-Powered Personalization: With consumer consent, Visa uses basic spend and purchase insights to help improve AI agent performance and personalize shopping recommendations. Consumers remain in full control of what information is shared. The system is designed with privacy at its core, offering granular control over what data is shared and how it’s used to shape the shopping experience.
  

• Secure Transaction Controls: Consumers can easily define spending limits and conditions for their AI agents, which allows consumers to easily set spending limits and conditions, establishing clear rules for how agents can conduct transactions. Visa enforces these preferences in real time by sharing commerce signals, helping to control transactions and support dispute management through its existing security and authentication technologies.

Visa is collaborating with major AI players including OpenAI, Microsoft, IBM, Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral AI, Samsung, and Stripe to ensure global scalability and trust.

“Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf,” said Forestell. “These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well.”

Mastercard: Agent Pay Brings Conversational AI to Commerce

Mastercard has launched Agent Pay, a new initiative designed to embed trusted payment capabilities into AI-powered experiences. The program introduces Agentic Payments, a framework that allows AI agents to conduct transactions on behalf of users—seamlessly, securely, and with full consumer control.

At the center of the initiative are Mastercard Agentic Tokens, an evolution of its proven tokenization technology already used in mobile wallets, secure card-on-file systems, and recurring payment models. These tokens enable AI agents to make purchases without exposing sensitive card information, while maintaining a clear chain of authorization.

Mastercard is collaborating with Microsoft to develop new use cases for agentic commerce and is partnering with IBM (via its watsonx Orchestrate product) to accelerate adoption in B2B transactions. Additional integration partners include Braintree, Checkout.com, and a broad network of merchants and acquirers that already support Mastercard’s tokenization tools.

For banks, tokenized payment credentials will be seamlessly integrated across agentic commerce platforms, keeping card issuers at the forefront of this rapidly evolving space. This ensures enhanced visibility, security, and control over transactions initiated by AI agents—maintaining trust across the payment ecosystem.

Use cases for Agent Pay span consumer and business experiences:

• A consumer can chat with an AI agent that proactively searches across online retailers, local boutiques, and brand websites to curate outfit options based on personal style, weather, and specific event details. Once satisfied, the agent completes the purchase and selects the optimal payment method, such as Mastercard One Credential.
  

• A small business can use an AI agent to manage sourcing, negotiate payment terms with suppliers, manages logistics with an international vendor, and complete a cross-border purchase using a virtual corporate Mastercard token, including arranging fast and affordable delivery.
  

• Retailers can use Mastercard’s tokenization technology to identify and verify customers, enabling consistent, personalized shopping experiences. This allows them to layer on tailored benefits—like product recommendations, free shipping, loyalty rewards, and targeted discounts.

Mastercard emphasizes that all agentic transactions will be anchored by a framework of security, transparency, and consumer control—developed in close collaboration with Microsoft and other technology partners:

• Trusted agent registration and verification: Mastercard will require AI agents to be securely registered and authenticated before they can initiate payments. In partnership with Microsoft, these standards will be embedded into platforms such as Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot Studio, enabling safe and scalable conversational commerce.
  

• Tokenized payment credentials: Enhanced tokenization technology allows payments to be initiated directly through conversational interfaces and executed at millions of online merchants. Tokenized credentials ensure transactions are traceable and authorized, giving issuers and merchants clear visibility into agent-initiated purchases for increased transparency.
  

• Strong consumer protections: Mastercard applies its best-in-class security infrastructure— including AI-powered fraud prevention, on-device biometrics, and identity verification—to protect consumers from end to end. The system also includes tools to clarify or dispute agent-led transactions that may be unfamiliar.
  

• Fraud protection and dispute support: Mastercard’s cybersecurity, authentication, and fraud detection capabilities safeguard the entire transaction process—from agent registration to payment authorization. AI agents will support strong consumer authentication using on-device biometrics, while built-in tools help consumers identify, verify, or dispute unfamiliar agent-initiated purchases.

Mastercard frames Agent Pay as a cornerstone of responsible AI development in commerce, ensuring that every stakeholder in the value chain—from consumers to banks to merchants—can recognize, authorize, and trust payments initiated by intelligent agents.

“Mastercard is transforming the way the world pays [...] by anticipating consumer needs on the horizon,” said Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert. “The launch of Mastercard Agent Pay marks our initial steps in redefining commerce in the AI era, including new merchant interfaces to distinguish trusted agents from bad actors using agentic technology.”

As part of its responsible AI commitment, Mastercard says it will continue evolving Agent Pay with a focus on transparency, user control, and industry-wide collaboration—laying the foundation for secure agentic payments at scale.

Competition and Industry Momentum

Visa and Mastercard's announcements arrive amid a broader surge of innovation in agentic commerce, as tech and financial giants race to define how AI will reshape consumer transactions.

• PayPal has introduced the PayPal Agent Toolkit, enabling developers to integrate its payment processes into AI agent workflows. This toolkit allows AI agents to handle tasks such as payments, shipment tracking, and invoice management directly through PayPal's platform. Additionally, PayPal is collaborating with major tech companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Anthropic to expand its agentic commerce capabilities.
  

• Amazon is testing a new feature called “Buy for Me”, which allows customers to find and purchase products from other brands’ websites without leaving the Amazon Shopping app. When an item isn’t sold on Amazon, the AI-powered assistant enables users to browse, check out, and track orders using their existing Amazon payment and shipping information—all within the app. Buy for Me is currently live in the Amazon Shopping app on both iOS and Android for a subset of U.S. customers, with testing underway for a limited number of brand stores and products. Amazon plans to expand the feature based on user feedback.
  

• OpenAI has enhanced its ChatGPT search tool to deliver a more intuitive online shopping experience, allowing users to ask for product recommendations and receive real-time links to buy.
  

• Google is integrating similar functionality into its generative search experience, connecting product queries to shoppable results across the web.

These developments reflect a growing race among financial and tech giants to define the infrastructure of commerce in an AI-enabled world.

What This Means

Visa and Mastercard’s entry into agentic commerce marks a foundational shift in how payments will function in an AI-driven world. Consumers will begin delegating routine shopping and purchasing tasks to intelligent agents—but with those agents operating inside strict, user-defined limits backed by decades of payment security infrastructure.

Merchants will need to adapt to AI-driven checkout flows, where the “customer” may be an agent but the expectations for trust, personalization, and dispute resolution remain the same. For developers, the launch of tokenization APIs and secure credentialing tools opens a new market for building AI-native commerce tools. And for banks, these changes preserve their role in the value chain by embedding visibility, security, and authorization into every AI-facilitated transaction.

Looking Ahead

The rise of agentic commerce will fundamentally reshape how people interact with online retailers, banking services, and AI platforms—turning autonomous agents into trusted financial actors. With Visa and Mastercard backing this model, the financial ecosystem is shifting from user-initiated payments to AI-managed transactions governed by pre-set rules and real-time controls.

But as adoption grows, the industry will face growing pressure to establish interoperable standards, ensure platform accountability, and define legal boundaries around agent permissions, fraud responsibility, and data sharing. With major payment networks, tech companies, and startups all building their own frameworks, questions of governance, transparency, and consumer protection will take center stage.

How regulators respond—and whether a common set of global standards emerges—may ultimately determine how far and how fast agentic commerce can scale.

Editor’s Note: This article was created by Alicia Shapiro, CMO of AiNews.com, with writing, image, and idea-generation support from ChatGPT, an AI assistant. However, the final perspective and editorial choices are solely Alicia Shapiro’s. Special thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with research and editorial support in crafting this article.