Visa unveils commerce platform enabling autonomous AI shopping

Visa is rolling out a platform that helps merchants make their product inventories discoverable and purchasable by AI agents.

Credit card giant Visa has ventured further into the agentic AI payments race, announcing a new platform on Wednesday to help businesses participate in AI-driven commerce.

In a statement on Wednesday, Visa described Intelligent Commerce Connect as a network, protocol, and “token vault-agnostic ‘on-ramp’” to agentic commerce for AI agent builders and merchants.

The system serves as a universal platform for agentic AI payments, which means AI agents acting for consumers can browse, select and pay for goods.

“Through a single integration via the Visa Acceptance Platform, Intelligent Commerce Connect enables secure payment initiation, tokenization, spend controls, and authentication,” the firm stated.

Crypto networks such as Ethereum, Tron and Solana, as well as fintech firms, have been positioning themselves as a way for AI agents to make online payments on behalf of consumers. 

The company said that Intelligent Commerce Connect supports both Visa and non-Visa card payments and is compatible with major AI agent protocols.

It also makes merchant catalogs discoverable within AI platforms, handles tokenization, spend controls, authentication, and PCI compliance and is accessible through one integration on the Visa Acceptance Platform.

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The system is currently in the pilot phase with select partners, and a broader rollout is planned for later in 2026.

It was not the first foray into agentic AI payments for Visa, which announced an experimental product called “Visa CLI” in March, allowing AI agents to make same-day payments. 

In a related announcement, AI fintech firm Nevermined integrated with Visa’s new Intelligent Commerce using Coinbase’s x402 protocol, enabling AI agents to buy digital goods and services autonomously.

Users can enroll their Visa card and set spending rules, while AI agents can transact independently within those guardrails, and merchants receive payments through their existing processor. 

“x402 gives agents an open standard to request payment programmatically, and this launch demonstrates how that can work alongside secure card infrastructure to enable real commercial transactions between AI agents and merchants,”  said Erik Reppel, the creator of the protocol.

x402 has processed $24 million in transactional volume over the past 30 days, according to the protocol website. 

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Source: CoinTelegraph