The news: Visa will give developers new tools to adapt to the rise of agentic commerce on its platforms, per PYMNTS.

Why it matters: Visa’s Intelligent Commerce application programming interfaces (APIs) historically were designed to keep bots out to prevent fraud, scraping, and hostile traffic. Now, Visa must contend with intentional payment-enabled agents making purchases on behalf of a customer on its network—a reversal of its anti-bot infrastructure. 

The network must convince merchants, issuers, and customers that agentic commerce is safe—and that they should use Visa’s network when they tell their chatbots to buy something.

Our take: Letting developers build on its network can help Visa maintain its pole payments position in the world of agentic commerce. 

But risks abound—uneven usability, haphazard standardization across issuers and merchants, and trepidation from consumers about using the tech: Just 30% of US consumers say they trust AI to make purchases for them, per Kantar. It is unlikely that customers will rapidly feel that using an online agent is as safe as placing an order themselves—and every mistake felt by merchants, consumers, and issuers on the agentic rollout will reinforce those opinions.

This is our immediate perspective. We’re actively developing this story throughout the day with more research and data from the EMARKETER database. Our in-depth analysis will be included in our client-only Briefings. Non-clients can click here to get a demo of our full platform and coverage.

Check out other EMARKETER content related to this story: 

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• PayPal turns publisher websites into storefronts with shoppable ad format
• Amazon implements guardrails as AI agents threaten traffic, ad revenues