Visa’s latest move into AI-powered shopping suggests that agentic commerce is moving from concept to infrastructure. The payments company has unveiled Intelligent Commerce Connect, a single integration designed to let businesses accept transactions initiated by AI agents, surface product catalogues inside AI platforms and handle payment, tokenisation, spend controls and authentication without forcing merchants to build separate connections for each channel.
According to Visaâ...
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€™s announcement, the service is intended to work across Visa and non-Visa card networks and to support major agent protocols. It is currently in pilot with partners including Aldar, AWS, Diddo, Highnote, Mesh, Payabli and Sumvin. Visa has framed the offer as a network-, protocol- and token-vault-agnostic on-ramp for companies preparing for a future in which AI agents do more of the work normally done by human shoppers.
The company is not starting from zero. In earlier announcements, Visa said it had already completed hundreds of secure, agent-initiated transactions with partners and was working with more than 100 collaborators globally on the plumbing required for AI commerce. It has also positioned its broader Intelligent Commerce push alongside partnerships with major technology firms including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung and Stripe.
That technical readiness, however, is only part of the story. The harder problem may be consumer trust. Research cited by CXM World suggests that while AI usage is rising, willingness to let it complete purchases still lags. Bain found that 72% of consumers have used AI tools in some form, but only 24% currently feel comfortable letting AI finish a purchase, and just 10% have actually done so, mostly for low-cost, routine goods. Forrester’s Consumer Pulse data found that 54% of US online adults are not comfortable sharing personal information with generative AI tools, while a Radial survey showed 19% of consumers saying they would never share payment details with an AI agent.
Visa’s own B2AI research points to a more nuanced picture. It found that 36% of respondents trust bank-backed AI systems and 35% trust payment-network-enabled AI, compared with 28% for independent AI agents. Confidence is notably stronger among younger shoppers, with 48% of Gen Z respondents saying they trust payment-network-enabled AI, versus 20% of Boomers.
That split matters for customer experience leaders. If agentic commerce becomes a mainstream buying route, brands will need more than functional integration; they will need clear proof that AI-led purchasing is secure, explainable and well governed. The risk, as the CXM World analysis argues, is not that the technology arrives too soon, but that companies fail to build the trust architecture required to make it usable at scale.
Visa’s pitch is that it can help solve that gap by using the trust associated with its payment network to make AI transactions feel safer. Whether consumers accept that proposition will determine how quickly agentic commerce moves from pilot projects to everyday retail behaviour. For now, the industry appears to be laying tracks ahead of demand, even as many shoppers remain hesitant to hand the checkout over to an algorithm.
Source: Noah Wire Services
