Visa Intelligent Commerce for merchants

Visa announced Visa Intelligent Commerce on 30 April 2025 at its Global Product Drop in San Francisco, describing it as an initiative that opens Visa’s payments network to developers and engineers building AI commerce. The same release named Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung and Stripe as companies Visa was working with.

The four parts, in Visa’s words

Visa’s developer overview for the programme, as of 13 October 2026, describes four capabilities:

• Tokenisation. A pass through payment token specific to agents, intended for use at merchants that accept Visa.
• Authentication. Step up verification of the cardholder and passkey setup, used to authenticate what the shopper instructed.
• Payment instructions. Controls that check a request for payment credentials matches the shopper’s authenticated instructions.
• Signals. Commerce data recording the original instruction and each authorised purchase, which Visa says can help resolve disputes.

All four sit between the shopper, the agent and the card network. None of them is a piece of software a merchant installs, which is the most useful thing to understand about the programme.

Where a merchant meets it

In two places. The first is the front door: an agent that reaches your product page has to get past your bot protection, and Visa’s answer to that is the Trusted Agent Protocol, which lets the agent prove it is a known agent rather than an anonymous bot.

The second is checkout. Visa’s developer page says initial payments use guest checkout and key entry, which it also calls form fill. In plain terms, the agent types an agent specific card into the same payment form a person would. Whether that works is decided by your checkout, not by Visa.

What decides whether the payment completes

1. A guest path. An agent buying for someone is not usually in a position to open an account in their name, so a checkout that insists on one stops it. See forced account creation and how to offer guest checkout for agents.
2. A payment step the agent can reach. A step hidden behind a script that never loads, or behind a popup, ends the purchase before the card is entered. See payment step unreachable.
3. No challenge at the last step. A CAPTCHA between the cart and the card form undoes everything the token was designed to make safe. See CAPTCHA at checkout.

None of these is specific to Visa. They are the same three things that decide whether any agent completes a purchase on your own checkout, which is why the preparation pays whichever network the shopper’s card belongs to.

What to ask your payment provider

Two questions are worth asking before volume arrives. Does the provider identify payments made with agent specific tokens, so you can see them as their own channel? And what evidence of the shopper’s instruction does it hold if a payment is disputed? Visa positions its signals as dispute evidence, and the provider is the party that would put it in front of you. See how agent payments actually settle.

How it relates to the protocols

Visa Intelligent Commerce is a network programme, not one of the commerce protocols. It works on a question close to the one the Agent Payments Protocol addresses, showing that a purchase was authorised, from the card network’s side. A merchant does not choose between them. See ACP, UCP, AP2 and MCP explained.