Visa is introducing an on-ramp for merchants to tap into its AI-driven Intelligent Commerce platform. The new offering, Intelligent Commerce Connect is designed to let AI agents discover merchants and complete purchases on behalf of users.
The service is currently being piloted with a number of partners, including AWS, with general availability expected to occur by the end of June.
The launch is aimed at positioning Visa for the expected growth of agentic commerce, though projects vary widely and remain speculative. Some forecasts have been ambitious—McKinsey for example, has suggested that the U.S. retail market could reach as much as $1 trillion in agent-driven transactions by 2030. However, such estimates depend on significant advances in the technology and adoption. Other data points suggest a much earlier-stage market, with Precedence Research estimating global agentic commerce at under $8 billion in 2025.
Available for Any Credit Card
According to Visa, the platform includes features such as secure payment initiation, tokenization, spend controls, and authentication for agent-initiated purchases. It’s not limited to Visa transactions; it also integrates APIs from other card networks alongside Visa’s own, and can connect with multiple payment token vault providers, allowing agent platforms to work across different vendors.
When an AI agent initiates a purchase, the system identifies the appropriate payment credential, replaces the card number with a token, and routes the transaction through the relevant network. It also verifies that the agent is acting within the parameters set by the users before passing payment credentials to the merchant.
A Big Leap into Agentic AI
The release builds on Visa’s earlier push into agentic commerce, following last year’s introduction of Visa Intelligent Commerce, which enabled AI agents to use stored Visa credentials at accepting merchants.
“This is a very strategic move and a natural extension of what they’ve built with the Visa Acceptance Platform,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “This effectively enables every VAP-connected processor and acquirer to offer a turnkey agentic commerce platform that’s interoperable with all of the current standards.”
“It’s important to remember that Visa’s customers in card acceptance aren’t the merchants, but rather the acquirers, processors, and PSPs,” Apgar said. “Visa didn’t bring VAP to market to compete with their customers by servicing merchants directly, but rather to enable their customers to bring new technology to their end-user merchants faster than ever.”
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