Visa Inc. and OpenAI announced a strategic partnership this week at Visa's Payments Forum in San Francisco to support AI agent-led payments. Under the collaboration, Visa will integrate its payment capabilities into OpenAI experiences, giving developers and merchants a framework to verify and process purchases made by AI agents (Digital Commerce 360 - AI). The integration will use tokenized Visa credentials, real-time authorization, and fraud monitoring, while allowing users to set guardrails on how much agents can spend and which merchant types they can access (Digital Commerce 360 - AI).
For commerce practitioners, this partnership represents a major infrastructure play in agentic commerce. McKinsey estimates that agentic commerce could account for up to $1 trillion in U.S. B2C retail sales by 2030, with global volume reaching $3 trillion to $5 trillion (Digital Commerce 360 - AI). Rather than limiting payment tools to general AI agents, Visa is embedding its infrastructure directly into OpenAI's platform, potentially enabling commerce to occur across multiple conversational interfaces and use cases (Digital Commerce 360 - AI).
Alongside the OpenAI partnership, Visa introduced additional agentic commerce tools including Agent Score to evaluate merchant readiness, an Agentic Directory of verified agents and merchants, and a Large Transaction Model trained on billions of transactions to improve fraud detection (Digital Commerce 360 - AI). Mastercard also expanded its agentic commerce offerings this week with Agent Pay for Machines, designed to enable agent-to-agent transactions at scale (Digital Commerce 360 - AI).