Payments giant Visa is opening up its Intelligent Commerce Platform to businesses around the world, expanding its infrastructure to enable artificial intelligence (AI) agents to shop, compare and complete purchases on behalf of consumers and businesses.
The move comes a week after Visa released its Business-to-AI (B2AI) report, in which 53% of U.S. business leaders surveyed said they would allow an AI agent to directly negotiate prices and terms with other AI agents on their behalf. The report also found that 71% of businesses intend to optimize their products, offers, and experiences for AI agents, and 77% are already using or piloting AI in their operations.
On the consumer side, approximately 40% of Americans reported making an unusual purchase as a result of using an AI agent or tool. This is an early sign that autonomous systems are actively shaping demand rather than simply filtering it.
Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Framework provides a unified suite of APIs across tokenization, authentication, payment instructions, and transaction signals to enable AI agents to securely transact on behalf of users.
Pilot programs are already running in several regions. Pilots will begin in early 2026 in Asia Pacific and Europe, with preparatory work underway in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the Middle East, Visa is working with developer Aldar to enable customers in the United Arab Emirates to use AI agents to pay recurring fees such as real estate service fees.
A core component of this framework is the Trusted Agent Protocol, an open framework introduced in October 2025 that allows merchants to differentiate between malicious bots and legitimate AI agents acting on behalf of consumers.
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Visa’s global initiative comes as competition intensifies over who controls the payment rails of AI agent commerce. Two crypto-native protocols are vying to become the foundational infrastructure for AI payments. One is Coinbase’s x402 standard, which recently moved under Linux Foundation governance with support from Google, Stripe, and Visa itself, and Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), which was launched by Stripe’s Tempo blockchain.
On the crypto front, Visa is risk-averse. Visa Crypto Labs launched its CLI tool in March. It is a command-line payment interface that allows AI agents to make payments without an API key or pre-funded account, directly targeting the same autonomous agent use case that crypto protocols are pursuing. The company also plans to expand its stablecoin collaboration with Bridge in March, offering stablecoin-linked cards to more than 100 countries.
The competing approaches highlight growing fault lines in the industry. While traditional payment providers such as Visa and Mastercard build a layer of trust on top of existing card rails, crypto advocates argue that blockchain infrastructure is better suited for a world where AI agents become first-class economic agents.
Frank Cooper III, Visa’s CMO, framed the company’s vision in terms of a B2AI framework, explaining the shift in commerce from markets to humans and from markets to machines, with AI agents evaluating, negotiating, and trading on behalf of people.
This article was written with the help of AI Workflow. All of our stories are hand-picked, edited and fact-checked by humans.
