.@Visa just gave AI agents their own card credentials. @OpenAI is partnering.
Agentic commerce has promised a lot, but delivered very little.
Is this finally agentic commerce's mainstream moment?
Announced yesterday at the Visa Payments Forum. The headline reads like "AI can shop for you now." The mechanic underneath is the interesting bit.
Start with tokenization.
It's the technology that takes your 16 digit card number and swaps it for a secure cryptographic token, so your real number never touches the merchant. That's what made Apple Pay work.
Visa Intelligent Commerce extends those tokens to agents.
Once an agent holds a token bound to it specifically, the agent has an identity on the Visa network. The same rails that already clear 300 billion transactions a year.
So when your agent goes to pay:
- Visa knows which agent is transacting
- The merchant knows it's a recognized, trusted agent operating under your rules
- Your bank can authorize in real time, against spending limits and approvals you set
Say your agent buys something and you tell your bank you never authorized it. With agent identity on the network, there's a record that it really was your agent, acting inside the guardrails you gave it. That changes agents from being a hostile "bot" to a trusted customer.
It also rhymes with every agent problem I keep running into. Autonomy only works when the system can prove what the agent did.
Agentic commerce has promised a lot, but delivered very little.
Is this finally agentic commerce's mainstream moment?
Announced yesterday at the Visa Payments Forum. The headline reads like "AI can shop for you now." The mechanic underneath is the interesting bit.
Start with tokenization.
It's the technology that takes your 16 digit card number and swaps it for a secure cryptographic token, so your real number never touches the merchant. That's what made Apple Pay work.
Visa Intelligent Commerce extends those tokens to agents.
Once an agent holds a token bound to it specifically, the agent has an identity on the Visa network. The same rails that already clear 300 billion transactions a year.
So when your agent goes to pay:
- Visa knows which agent is transacting
- The merchant knows it's a recognized, trusted agent operating under your rules
- Your bank can authorize in real time, against spending limits and approvals you set
Say your agent buys something and you tell your bank you never authorized it. With agent identity on the network, there's a record that it really was your agent, acting inside the guardrails you gave it. That changes agents from being a hostile "bot" to a trusted customer.
It also rhymes with every agent problem I keep running into. Autonomy only works when the system can prove what the agent did.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
