Both payment network providers, Visa and Mastercard, have almost simultaneously unveiled their initiatives to enable the future of AI-driven agentic commerce.
On Apr. 29, Mastercard introduced the Agent Pay solution, designed to scale agentic commerce in collaboration with Microsoft and other leading AI platforms. Meanwhile, Visa also presented a suite of AI-driven agentic commerce tools called Visa Intelligent Commerce on Apr. 30.
Mastercard’s Agent Pay program will require trusted AI agents to be registered and verified to further make secure payments on behalf of their users. The firm envisions numerous use cases for the new tools, including agents independently shopping for an occasion or any given purpose based on user preferences and feedback. Such agents could also presumably be used by businesses to handle sourcing, optimise payment terms and manage logistics.
To reach these goals, the program will leverage Mastercard Agentic Tokens, which expand on existing secure tokenisation technologies used for things like mobile tap-to-pay, saved cards, and secure online logins. These tokens also support automated payments like subscriptions and regular bills. In the new initiative, tokenised payment credentials will be seamlessly integrated across agentic commerce platforms. The goal is to create a future where people and businesses can safely and confidently make smart, automated transactions in an AI-driven e-commerce ecosystem.
Mastercard will collaborate with Microsoft on the agentic AI infrastructure, taking advantage of the partner’s leading AI technologies, including Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Besides, Mastercard collaborates with other top technology enablers like IBM, leveraging its watsonx Orchestrate product, to accelerate B2B use cases.
Almost at the same time, Visa has announced its own set of agentic commerce tools. The initiative opens Visa’s payment network to the developers and engineers building the foundational AI agents for e-commerce purposes. The payment provider offers a suite of integrated APIs and a commercial partner program to relevant AI platforms, along with AI-ready cards, where card details are replaced with tokenised digital credentials, AI-powered personalisation features, which enable agents to analyse basic Visa spend and purchase insights to better understand consumer’s preferences, and payment infrastructure facilitating easy setup for spending limits and conditions required for agentic commerce experiences.
Visa’s program will power the whole agentic shopping process, starting from browsing and selection to purchase and post-purchase management. It also includes authorisation and transaction controls over what a designated AI agent purchases on a user’s behalf and within which limits, and provides a set of protections against fraud, privacy infringements and disputes.
Naturally, Visa is also not alone in its initiative, partnering with tech industry leaders like OpenAI, IBM, Samsung, and Perplexity AI – a rapidly growing startup developing a search engine powered by artificial intelligence.
The benefits of agentic AI for e-commerce processes are indispensable. It transforms the way people discover new products, make purchase decisions or delegate it to an agent, and search for the best price. It seems the two payment providers have synchronised their innovative offerings in response to the growing demand for AI agents powering seamless online shopping experiences. In recent times, we have received numerous announcements of agentic AI infrastructure development from both smaller fintech startups and leading e-commerce marketplaces.
