When AI agents can transact, who sets the limits?

The commercial upside becomes easier to picture when an AI agent can act on someone’s behalf. For a company, that could mean reordering inventory, paying an invoice, managing suppliers, or booking business travel within preset rules. Each of those tasks also hands a degree of authority to software.

Egyptian businesses are already thinking about what has to be in place before they give an agent more authority. In *Agentic Commerce: Market Insights and Outlook for Egypt*, research we commissioned from Fast Company Middle East, powered by Probity, data privacy and security are the leading adoption concern among respondents at 19.3%, followed by unclear returns at 17.2% and regulatory compliance at 15%.

For decades, commerce has run on trust among consumers, merchants, issuers and acquirers, and at Visa we have helped build it. The AI agent is a new participant in that system.

Trust now has another dimension: intent. Digital commerce has long relied on identity, authentication, and authorization. With an AI agent in the transaction, businesses also need confidence that it is acting within the permissions, limits, and preferences the user actually set.

That makes governance part of the transaction itself. Businesses need to decide who is accountable for an agent’s actions, what spending or decision limits apply, which transactions require human approval, and what happens when an agent moves outside its mandate. The report itself points to human-in-the-loop thresholds, escalation paths, and compliance guardrails as priorities before businesses scale.

For banks and issuers, that creates a defined role. Delegated spending controls, authentication, risk monitoring, and trusted credentials can set the boundaries for what an agent can do and flag activity outside them.

We are building the infrastructure behind that trust. Through Visa Intelligent Commerce, the Trusted Agent Protocol, tokenization and fraud intelligence, along with biometric authentication and developer-ready APIs, we are working toward authenticated agents, protected transactions, and consumer control. Our network spans more than 200 countries and territories and supports more than 175 mn merchant locations.

At Visa, our standard is: to authenticate the agent, define its authority and make sure the transaction reflects the user’s intent.

Malak El Baba, country manager, Egypt, Libya and Sudan, Visa