Imagine a world where your personal AI agent is able to help you plan, book and pay for everything from a highly-customized weekend getaway, to a business trip, or even your child’s birthday party — all in a matter of minutes. That’s the future the financial services giant imagines with a suite of products and services it unveiled at a global product drop in San Francisco last week.

Welcome to what Visa is calling “Visa intelligent commerce,” which it said will allow AI agents to find and buy products and services for their human masters. EnterpriseAM was there as Visa CEO Ryan McInerney and Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell showcased the products they think will drive the next wave of AI-driven commerce and money movement.

The promise: Give the bot your credit card, your size, and the cut and color you want, and it will go find that perfect pair of jeans for you. “As new ways to pay emerge, they need to run on a network that is always on — that is safe, secure, scalable and relentlessly innovating,” said McInerney. “We are taking the power of our network and our decades-long expertise to bring new products and solutions that will transform commerce and bring trust and security to AI-enabled payments,” he added.

Roll-your-own AI commerce: A key focus of the gathering was Visa Intelligent Commerce, through which Visa is opening its payments network to developers and engineers building the first generation of AI commerce.

Visa thinks AI commerce could have an impact on the same magnitude as e-commerce itself: “We believe that the shift to AI driven-commerce will rival the level of impact that e-commerce had,” said Forestell. “E-commerce relieved us of the burden of having to physically go out and find merchandise, but we still have to find ways to comb through and compare every available product on earth before making a purchasing decision.”

How? AI agents. “AI agents have the potential to remove that cognitive burden and to save the user an extraordinary amount of time, but in order for AI driven commerce to work, we have to solve the payment problem which is largely rooted in trust.”

SOUND SMART- Boosters of the technology see an AI agent as smart software “unleashed”: It can “see” its digital environment, roam the web, make decisions, and act on its own to achieve specific goals you set for it.

The promise? Big boosts in efficiency by automating complex workflows 24/7, hyper-personalized customer interactions at scale, and freeing up people for higher-value work. Imagine streamlining everything from logistics to financial analysis.

The catch? AI agents are very much in their infancy. They’re complex and costly to build and integrate. Ensuring they operate safely, ethically, securely, and reliably — without going off-script — is the key challenge. Then there’s managing data privacy and figuring out who’s responsible if things inevitably get complicated or go awry.

Visa says its network is key to getting businesses and developers to build AI commerce on a foundation of trust. “Visa will bring trust to AI commerce by providing a simple way for our partners — AI platforms, tech players, banks, fintechs, merchants and more — to access the Visa network. This is the next step in Visa’s journey to connect even more buyers and sellers through seamless, secure digital payments,” explained Forestell.

Also in Visa’s pipeline: AI-ready cards, which involve upgrading Visa cards with tokenization and authentication to ensure secure transactions with AI agents. Simple and secure AI payments will be facilitated through new services like payment instructions and payment signals, providing trust, transparency, and control for all parties involved, the company says. And AI-powered personalization could inject insights from bns of payment transactions — provided the privacy implications can get sorted out.

Also in the news: The San Francisco event also featured updates on Visa’s broader product roadmap, including advancements in digital identity, flex credentials, and stablecoins. The company also launched Visa Pay and Visa Accept, two new products designed to expand access to the Visa network for consumers and sellers.

In context: Visa’s tech is still in the early testing phase. Mastercard says it’s working on something it is calling “Agent Pay” that will also integrate payments into AI chatbots, and PayPal showed off an agentic AI toolkit last week

Want a taste? Catch Visa’s teaser for the event here.

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