Visa, Mastercard racing to bring AI spending agents to market

Mastercard and Visa are working at pace to launch AI agents ready to do your shopping for you as they claim the future of spending is in “agentic commerce”.

The world’s two biggest payment companies both touted upcoming agentic spending tools in earnings calls this week, with Visa CEO Ryan McInerney revealing its Intelligent Commerce platform will be entering general availability later this year.

He explained the tool “combines a suite of integrated APIs, including AI ready cards with tokenization and authentication, together with a commercial partner program for AI platforms, enabling developers to deploy Visa’s AI commerce capabilities.”

Mastercard’s European Services Leader Michele Centemero told The Stack the tech will be “transformational” for e-commerce, claiming “the common view is consumers are super ready to start [using this], so adoption will be really fast.”