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) 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.

Playing the long game? Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls, per Gartner. Visa isn’t risking missing out on AI commerce, but it may take some time for real benefits or competitive advantages to materialize.

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 will take time for customers to 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.

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