Visa’s Agentic Payments Push: What Nearly 50 Live AI Partners Really Signals
On Saturday we had an X post that looked at a key number from Visa’s latest earnings call: nearly 50 AI partners are now live and in production on its agentic payments program, including Shopify’s Shop Pay.
CEO Ryan McInerney expects that number to double in the coming months.
It’s a sign that AI agents paying for things is moving out of the lab. The full picture is more nuanced, though, and the details matter.
What Is Visa Intelligent Commerce?
Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC) is Visa’s system for letting AI agents make purchases for people and businesses, either with or without a human in the loop.
Visa’s pitch is simple: “trust is the biggest barrier to scale.” VIC tackles that barrier in four ways:
Trust in the user: Identity verification and tokenization tie each agent to a real person. Tokens let an agent pay without exposing the actual card number.
Trust in the agent: Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and directory of verified agents help confirm that an agent is legitimate.
Trust in the instructions: Visa captures authenticated consumer intent, so the agent buys what the user actually authorized.
A path when things go wrong: Visa’s rules and dispute processes define who is responsible for what.
From Sandbox to Production
As recently as January, Visa described more than 100 partners engaged and over 30 actively building in its sandbox. Those figures measure a different stage than today’s production count, so this isn’t a clean jump from 30 to 50. The direction is still clear: more of the work is moving from testing to live use.
Recent partner news shows how far that has spread:
OpenAI: A strategic partnership announced in June supports Visa payments in agentic experiences.
Anthropic: Visa is collaborating to bring Anthropic’s commerce blueprints to its merchant network.
Ramp: Its agentic bill pay product is now generally available.
BILL and Billtrust: BILL’s payment agent is piloting VIC to pay invoices, and Billtrust’s supplier portal identifies the agent and accepts payment.
Airwallex: The company is testing VIC-enabled credentials.
B2B may be the sleeper story here. Visa has identified it as an area for fast adoption, and invoice payment is a repetitive job that suits agents well.
The Reality Check
McInerney called the past quarter a tipping point for people actually being able to use agents for real transactions. He was just as clear that it’s still very early. Agentic commerce will remain very small relative to Visa’s business over the next four quarters, and Visa hasn’t disclosed agent-initiated transaction volumes.
Mastercard sounded a similar note two days later. CEO Michael Miebach said “the numbers are not yet significant in the grand scheme.”
A Race, but Not a Simple One
Four names keep coming up in the agent payments race, but they don’t all do the same job:
Visa Intelligent Commerce: Network-level trust and tokenization
Mastercard Agent Pay: Mastercard’s equivalent, built on Agentic Tokens
Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP): Co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): Led by Google and co-developed with Shopify and major retailers
These efforts overlap as much as they compete. Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect is designed to accept payments initiated through several protocols, including ACP and UCP, and it supports non-Visa cards too. Shop Pay, meanwhile, works with both Visa and Mastercard.
That points to the real story: Visa doesn’t need one protocol to win. It wants to be the trusted layer underneath whichever ones do. There’s still no clear winner, but the card networks are positioning themselves to benefit either way.
What to Watch
Does Visa’s live partner count actually reach about 100 in the coming months?
Will Visa start disclosing agentic transaction volumes?
How quickly can issuers and acquirers get ready to support agentic tokens at scale?
Does B2B scale faster than consumer shopping?
The infrastructure is arriving faster than the volume. For now, that’s the most important takeaway.
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