Credit card giant Visa has launched a new platform named Intelligent Commerce Connect, a new solution that makes it easier for businesses to connect and participate in AI-powered commerce using AI agents to shop, pick, and make purchases on behalf of the users. This is a big change to agentic commerce, in which artificial intelligence goes beyond suggestions to conducting transactions.
The platform is poised as a global infrastructure layer, where businesses can incorporate AI-based purchasing functions without re-engineering the current payment systems.
At the centre of the system is the Visa Acceptance Platform that eases the onboarding of merchants and developers. It is compatible with Visa and non-Visa cards and is therefore a cross-payment network.
It also does important payment operations like tokenization, authentication, spend controls and PCI compliance. This saves time and effort for merchants and ensures the security levels needed when making large financial transactions.
Additionally, the system ensures that merchant product catalogs are discoverable within the AI ecosystems. This enables AI agents to access real-time pricing, product descriptions, and inventory data, making automated purchasing decisions accurate and efficient.
This step by Visa comes at a time when blockchain networks and other fintech systems are becoming competitive. Infrastructure to support AI-driven payments is also being developed in Ethereum, Tron, and Solana-based ecosystems.
In related news, Nevermined, which is integrated with Visa through the x402 protocol created by Coinbase.
The protocol has already transacted around $24 million worth of transactions within the last 30 days, which is a pointer to the increasing traction of machine-to-machine payments.
Agent platforms can plug into existing credential infrastructure and avoid being locked into a single token vault.
Enables merchants to accept payments initiated via major agent protocols, including Trusted Agent Protocol, Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP).
Helps merchants make their product inventories and product details (e.g., descriptions, specifications, prices, etc.)
Visa can handle orchestration and PCI compliance for enablers supporting merchant transactions.
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The introduction indicates a wider trend in which companies are anticipating a more AI-driven future where AI agents will serve as the core digital customers. With the increased use of AI, payment infrastructure will have to be modified to allow automated real-time decision-making.
This more complete platform is based on what Visa had previously tried, Visa CLI, which allowed same-day AI-driven payments. The existing implementation is a pilot one and it will be implemented more broadly in 2026.