The trend: Artificial intelligence is working its way into every facet of the US economy, and the payments industry is no exception.

As 2025 comes to a close, we look back on some of the biggest moves card networks, issuers, BNPL providers, and the rest of the industry made in the genAI space.

Networks vie for agentic dominance: Visa and Mastercard both rolled out platforms to support transactions conducted by AI agents.

• Visa launched Trusted Agent Protocol, the Visa Commerce Hub, and Visa Intelligence. Each is designed to connect merchants with consumers shopping through chatbots and validate authentic agentic transactions.
• Mastercard rolled out Agent Pay and napped key partnerships with Citi and US Bank.

PayPal lands critical partnerships: It’s working directly with some of the most popular genAI chatbots.

• Its most developed deals are with Perplexity. It launched conversational commerce with Pro users in May before rolling out Buy Instantly ahead of Black Friday—connecting its merchants to all Perplexity users. PayPal and Venmo users can also get a free yearlong trial of Perplexity Pro.
• In October it struck a similar deal with ChatGPT.
• PayPal also partnered with one of its key wallet competitors—Google—with a focus on agentic commerce. The two will integrate PayPal’s payment tech across Google’s consumer- and business-facing products. Google rolled out agentic checkout shortly before Black Friday.
• PayPal also built a feature for the Honey browser plugin that will search for products recommended by any chatbot and find the best deals across the web.

BNPL players seek AI gains: Whether through agentic commerce or AI-augmented marketing strategies, BNPL players see AI as key to their growth.

• Klarna was an early AI adopter, but it’s maintained a more back-end approach rather than developing agentic capabilities. It froze hiring in 2024 and leaned on AI for customer service and other non-engineering roles. (It later backtracked some of those ambitions.) It later partnered with Google for hyperpersonalized advertisements powered by genAI.
• Affirm also partnered with Google, adopting its Agent Payment Protocol to get its loans in front of both consumers and robo-shoppers.
• And Splitit debuted an Agentic Commerce Partner Program to make its card-linked installment plans available for agentic commerce.

What this means for 2026: Agentic commerce has barely broken into the mainstream. While the changes to consumers’ payment behavior will be gradual, providers need to act now, according to our 2026 AI in the Payments Customer Life Cycle report.

Providers need to overcome critical issues like data fragmentation, but a well executed AI strategy can help providers maintain control over product discovery and streamline checkout.