AI shopping at scale: how Visa is driving the future of agentic commerce
The company’s latest innovation empowers consumers and merchants to embrace agent-led payments with confidence
Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, it has grown to the point where an astonishing 700 million users were sending 18 billion messages a week as of July 2025, according to parent company OpenAI.
The sheer speed and growth in the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems in e-commerce has also been nothing short of phenomenal. A recent survey by Adobe of 5,000 consumers based in the United States found that 52 per cent of the respondents plan to use generative AI when they are shopping online.
Visa, one of the largest payment companies in the world, believes AI-driven commerce will dramatically disrupt and change the payment landscape of Asia-Pacific. The region is now second only to North America in adoption of the tools, according to research released this year by the Boston Consulting Group.
And as these systems evolve from chat-based tools into agents, more and more businesses are quickly moving to embrace this technology to boost e-commerce growth, enhance shopping experiences and streamline operations.
“We believe AI will transform digital commerce,” says Abhijeet Ramesh, vice-president, innovation, growth products and tech partnerships for Asia-Pacific at Visa. “Consumers already use AI agents to compile grocery lists and plan holiday trips, reshaping the shopping journey from discovery to consideration.”
As mentioned, generative AI sources have already made a significant difference in the US e-commerce market. Adobe reported that AI-driven traffic to retail websites in the US has increased by 4,700 per cent year on year in June 2025, while 85 per cent of shoppers who have used AI say it enhanced their online retail experience.
Visa expects the Asia-Pacific region to rapidly catch up in view of the fact that mobile and app-based shopping have become almost second nature to consumers in countries such as Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.
In Southeast Asia, Visa’s “Consumer Payment Attitudes” survey found that over one in three consumers in the region have used generative AI to shop online, and more than two-thirds say they intend to use it at some point – a strong indicator that consumers are more than ready for AI-driven commerce to become the norm.
“In a nutshell, what we are seeing is a good mix of infrastructure readiness and market appetite for AI shopping to really take off in Asia-Pacific,” Ramesh says.
He adds that AI-led transactions will likely proliferate in Asia-Pacific because it already has a well-established mobile payment infrastructure. A significant proportion of customers in the region now use AI-ready cards, while the adoption of payment tokenisation – where a data security process replaces sensitive payment information (such as a credit card number) with a unique identifier, or token – is also high.
“Naturally, payment is the next step. Soon, consumers will be able to tell their AI agents to pay for purchases on their behalf, completing the AI commerce experience,” says Ramesh. “This also means AI agents will play a bigger role in consumer-merchant relationships. It is crucial that we establish the right infrastructure to create trust that enables AI commerce to flourish, in the way that digital commerce has over the past few decades.”
Many businesses and consumers recognise the benefits of adopting the use of AI agents, but some still question the level of security of their transactions on third-party apps and e-commerce platforms.
Another survey, released in March by the International Data Corporation (IDC), also pointed to the strong growth potential of agentic commerce in Asia-Pacific in the near term. Around 70 per cent of organisations in the region said AI agents will have a significant impact on business models within the next 18 months, the survey revealed.
Visa lays groundwork for AI commerce
The combination of huge consumer demand and infrastructure readiness underpins the launch of Visa Intelligent Commerce, a suite of payment services that includes payment tokens and Visa Payment Passkey, an authentication solution to ensure secure transactions and foster trust among consumers.
“Much like when digital commerce emerged, we expect trust and security to be top of mind for consumers, merchants and issuers,” Ramesh says. “Trust is exactly what we are building with Visa Intelligent Commerce. If AI agents are going to do more of the shopping, what happens to the buyer and seller, and how do I know AI agents can be trusted? Asia-Pacific has a strong foundation in payments security and the conditions are ripe for agentic commerce to take off.”
One of Visa Intelligent Commerce’s fundamental building blocks, payment tokenisation, allows consumers to provide an encrypted credential to AI agents they trust, authenticated by Visa’s protocols and its global network of financial institutions.
“It works seamlessly with other parts of Visa Intelligent Commerce, such as Payment Instructions and Payment Signals, to make sure transactions only happen with consumers’ permission, with quality data for more accurate transactions to reduce fraud,” Ramesh says.
“Tokenisation has shown to reduce fraud by 58 per cent for merchants in Asia-Pacific today, and we expect this strong foundation to serve our clients and partners well in agentic commerce.”
Visa Intelligent Commerce is also creating a framework of dispute resolution that builds trust and confidence in agent-led payments. “If the AI agent, for example, purchases a pair of red socks instead of blue ones that the consumer instructed it to, the same dispute and protection rights that apply to transactions made with Visa cards today should apply to agent-led transactions,” Ramesh says.
To create a fair and equitable way to manage disputes in the age of agentic commerce, Ramesh says the key is to embed quality data within consumer transactions that will work with an AI agent’s application programming interface (API).
“We use signals which match the transaction data to the consumer prompt and the payment preferences are inserted into the AI agent platform. That way, we can tell whether the item received is accurate to what consumers wanted and ordered.”
Building trust at scale for merchants
By implementing a trustworthy payment process and adding building blocks to ensure accuracy, Visa intends to turn agentic commerce from concept into reality. In short, it is making agentic commerce easily deployable and scalable for merchants who have not considered it previously.
Ramesh says that in addition to making themselves more discoverable by AI agents and platforms, merchants need new payment capabilities to securely engage AI agents and to accept AI-led transactions seamlessly, safely and at scale.
“We are making great progress with our new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that standardises AI interactions with our payment services, so developers and partners can build models once and use them everywhere. For merchants, our Acceptance Agent Toolkit allows them to deploy agentic commerce services with plain commands without any prior knowledge of coding,” Ramesh says.
A new development is the Trusted Agent Protocol, a foundational framework that Visa has developed to help merchants distinguish trusted agents from bots and other forms of fraud. It allows merchants to pinpoint the underlying consumer and verify the agent’s credentials – all without the need to overhaul their existing systems or the customer experience. The protocol standardises agent recognition to improve the security of AI-led transactions, allowing agentic commerce to be scaled more effectively around the world.
“It is all about how we can turn agentic commerce from a cool new idea into something real and scalable by combining Visa’s globally trusted suite of payment capabilities with AI technologies, and then making them easy for merchants, issuers and partners to use in this new era of AI commerce,” Ramesh says.
Visa’s record in enabling safe, reliable and seamless digital commerce – along with a trusted network connecting nearly 14,500 financial institutions and more than 150 million merchants worldwide – makes it the perfect partner for global AI industry leaders such as Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung and Stripe.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Visa Intelligent Commerce is gaining momentum as the company is exploring partnerships with Ant International, Grab and Tencent to grow AI commerce and deliver a secure and seamless checkout experience for agentic commerce.
“Visa Intelligent Commerce is built on our strong foundation. We are also rapidly developing new APIs and services built for AI commerce together with our partners in Asia-Pacific and the world. Visa is not just making agentic commerce possible, we are making it better and more secure for everyone,” Ramesh concludes.
Visa is taking part in the Singapore FinTech Festival from November 12 to 14, where it will demonstrate how Visa is using AI to shape the commerce landscape.