Why payment giants are handing the keys to AI agents

If you feel like your card company is suddenly eager to have a bot spend money for you, you’re not imagining it.

Visa, Mastercard, and their rivals see “agentic commerce” as the next big shift after the move from in‑store swipes to online checkouts, and they don’t want to be left watching from the sidelines.

According to CNBC, both companies have spent the past year building systems that let AI agents search, compare prices, and actually complete purchases using your stored card credentials, with commercial rollouts targeted as early as 2026.

Mastercard's Sandeep Malhotra offered further explanation to CNBC.

Malhotra added that payments are moving “from digital to intelligent transactions."

That line captures the core play for payment giants: keep their rails central as commerce shifts from you tapping “buy now” to your AI doing it automatically.

How agentic commerce actually works

In an agentic commerce world, you give an AI assistant your rules and your card details, then it shops for you in the background.

Instead of opening five tabs to hunt for a flight or a TV, you might tell your agent to “book me the cheapest non‑stop to London next Friday, in economy, using my Visa, and stay under $800,” and the agent does all the search and checkout without you touching a shopping cart.

CNBC reported that Visa and Mastercard are already running trials where AI agents can complete end‑to‑end transactions inside chat interfaces, from product discovery through payment authorization.

A separate report cited by TechResearchOnline noted that Visa has already completed “hundreds” of AI‑powered transactions in its pilot program, proving that this is more than a slide‑deck concept.

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Visa’s “Intelligent Commerce” program, launched in April, gives developers APIs that plug identity checks, spending controls, and tokenized card credentials into AI agents, according to Digital Commerce 360.

Mastercard’s Agent Pay product uses similar tokenization and rule‑setting, so agents can pay on your behalf while staying inside the network’s existing security perimeter.

Why Visa and Mastercard are embracing agentic AI now

Payment networks are chasing three things: transaction volume, data, and relevance. AI agents potentially deliver all three at once.

First, there is a land grab underway. CNBC reports that big payment and tech firms view agentic commerce as “the next phase of global trade,” with executives arguing it could ultimately be more transformative than the arrival of Amazon‑style e‑commerce.

In an analysis summarized by Reuters, Boston Consulting Group projects that the agentic commerce market could grow at an average annual rate of about 45 percent from 2024 to 2030, which helps explain why Visa has partnered with OpenAI, Microsoft, and others to lock in early access.

Second, the consumer behavior shift is already here. Visa told CNBC that in a recent survey, nearly half of U.S. shoppers said they are using AI to help with purchasing decisions.

A separate deep dive from Read the Joe estimated that AI‑driven shopping activity has surged by roughly 4,700% over the past year, prompting Visa and Google to launch competing protocols that help merchants distinguish legitimate shopping agents from bots that might be scraping sites.

Third, networks don’t want Big Tech or retailers to “own” the agent layer. Amazon is piloting a “Buy For Me” tool and has been testing ways to keep third‑party agents from freely crawling its site, Modern Retail reported.

This comes even as the company says it expects to eventually partner with outside shopping agents. If agents become the main gateway to commerce, card networks either integrate tightly or risk becoming invisible utilities.

AI-supported payment: the trust, fraud, and liability puzzle

Handing a software agent your card and permission to act is a big trust leap, so the payment giants are racing to hard‑wire safety into the system.

Digital Commerce 360 reports that Visa’s Intelligent Commerce stack relies heavily on tokenization, swapping your actual card number for a unique digital credential that can be limited to a specific AI agent, device, or merchant.

Mastercard’s Agent Pay similarly uses “agentic tokens” and requires that AI agents be registered and verified before they can initiate payments, according to company materials and follow‑up analysis by Paystrax.

Visa also plans to send “payment signals” to banks that contain extra data about agent‑initiated transactions, helping issuers authenticate that a particular AI is allowed to act on your behalf, CNBC reported.

In the same CNBC piece, Visa executive T. Ramachandran said the company is working through how liability should work when an agent makes a mistake, noting that agents add another layer to disputes, which historically involved only the cardholder, issuing bank, acquiring bank, and merchant.

For your wallet, the upside is more control if the tools are implemented correctly. Visa says its platform will let you set granular rules, like hard spending caps, specific merchant categories and conditions under which an AI can check out, and then enforce those rules in real time using its transaction data.

Mastercard highlights similar controls, saying payments via agents must be “authenticated, transparent, and easy to monitor across the value chain” to protect against fraud and unauthorized activity.

What AI payment agents mean for your money

Here are some early ways in which AI agents could change your day‑to‑day spending, based on what Visa, Mastercard, and independent analysts are describing.

• Automated deal‑hunting: Your agent can track prices on repeat buys, from groceries to streaming subscriptions, and automatically switch or buy when it finds a cheaper option that meets your rules, Fintech Wrap Up reports.
• Smarter travel bookings: Instead of manually juggling fare alerts, you can ask an agent to watch a route and only book when flights drop below a set threshold, using stored card details, notes Digital Commerce 360.
• Subscription cleanup: Agents could analyze recurring charges and flag or even cancel subscriptions you no longer use, according to Fintech Wrap Up, assuming you approve that level of control.
• Risk‑aware budgeting: Because these systems sit on top of card networks, they can use live transaction data to stop purchases that would break your budget rules or look like fraud, reports Kurvpay.

The catch is that you need to treat an AI agent like giving a trusted family member a card on your account, not like downloading a casual app. Set strict spend limits, keep categories narrow at first, and watch your statements to see how the agent behaves in practice. 

The next couple of years will likely bring more pilots, more partnerships, and more fine print as payment giants and tech platforms negotiate who really sits in the driver’s seat.

For your finances, the safest move is to embrace the convenience and potential savings of AI agents step by step, while remembering one important rule: The bot might do the clicking, but you are still the one paying the bill.

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