The news: Visa launched the Trusted Agent Protocol, infrastructure meant to facilitate secure communication between AI agents and merchants to complete transactions, per a press release.

How we got here: Payment providers and retailers are rushing to adapt their platforms for agentic commerce. 

• OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol powers the Stripe-backed Instant Checkout for ChatGPT. And Walmart announced Tuesday that it would let consumers order goods directly through the AI chatbot.
• PayPal inked deals with Google and Anthropic; it will be the default payment provider for Anthropic’s Perplexity Pro and Comet browser and will power Google’s coming AI-powered commerce solutions. 
• Splitit debuted its Agentic Commerce Partner Program to get an early mover advantage in the buy now, pay later (BNPL) space as a smaller platform.
• And Klarna deepened its partnership with Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), which facilitates agent-led transactions at checkout for merchants.

Why this matters: As the largest US card network provider— Visa processes $6.985 trillion in US transaction value, per our forecast—its strategy legitimizes and cements agentic commerce’s role in shopping. 

Visa’s efforts to maintain a secure and fraud-protected payment rails that must now distinguish “good” bots from “bad” show the network trying to preserve its place in the payment ecosystem by proactively adapting to new technologies.

Our take: Fully operationalized agentic commerce will take time to get off the ground. However, Visa’s endorsement of agentic commerce demands reluctant AI-adopters to quickly gear themselves for a new age of payment facilitation, or face irrelevance. 

Major payment rails especially need to convince merchants not to abandon their infrastructure to pursue things like blockchain-based transactions, as major retailers like Walmart and Amazon try to save money on fees. Offering seamless agentic commerce can entice these retailers to stay loyal.