The Future is Here: Visa Announces New Era of Commerce Featuring AI

Al Bawaba

01-05-2025

The future of commerce is on display at the Visa Global Product Drop with powerful AI-enabled advancements allowing consumers to find and buy with AI plus the introduction of new strategic partnerships and product innovations.
'As new ways to pay emerge, they need to run on a network that is always on – that is safe, secure, scalable and relentlessly innovating,' said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney. 'We are taking the power of our network and our decades-long expertise to bring new products and solutions that will transform commerce and bring trust and security to AI-enabled payments.'
Product Roadmap
Visa kicked off its Global Product Drop by sharing how the combination of AI and digital commerce will mark a significant shift in the way consumers discover and buy products and services. In the near future, consumers will enable AI agents to browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf. For this to be possible, agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well. Visa will bring this trust to AI commerce by providing a simple way for our partners – AI platforms, tech players, banks, fintechs, merchants and more – to access the Visa network. This is the next step in Visa's journey to connect even more buyers and sellers through seamless, secure digital payments.
Headlining the announcement, the company introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce, a groundbreaking initiative that opens Visa's payments network to developers and engineers building the first generation of true AI commerce. Visa also announced new stablecoin partnerships to reach more people and geographies. Finally, Visa shared the expansion of its Flex Credential platform, and new products and services that provide more ways for people to pay and get paid.
The advancements introduced today will enable the next wave of commerce and money movement.
Visa Intelligent Commerce: A New Era
In the last 25 years, Visa's network has processed 3.3 trillion transactions. Visa will extend the infrastructure, standards and capabilities present in physical and digital commerce today to AI commerce. Soon consumers will enable AI agents via AI platforms to use a Visa credential (of which there are 4.8 billion today) at any accepting merchant location (currently totaling over 150 million) for any payment use case.
'Historically, Visa has used AI to protect consumers, harnessing it to help combat fraud. Now, we will also enable AI to empower consumers, fundamentally shifting digital commerce to make it more personal, more relevant and more delightful,' added McInerney. 'For any AI commerce use case to take hold, the payment is a critical enabler of success. If there is no payment, there is no commerce. That's the expertise and trust that Visa brings.'
To move the needle on AI commerce at the speed and scale required, the company is collaborating with the AI platforms and brands that consumers and merchants are choosing to work with every day, including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Stripe and Samsung.
'We see tremendous potential for the role AI agents will play in commerce, from streamlining 'regular' transaction-driven tasks such as ordering groceries, to more sophisticated search and decision-making like securing that hard-to-get restaurant reservation or concert ticket,' said Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer. 'This will be a transformative change, bringing more magic and convenience to the consumer experience and creating a new world that will forever change how we shop and buy.'
New Products, Advancements and Capabilities
Visa continues to invest in new features and capabilities that help extend the reach of its network and provide secure and seamless payment experiences.
Stablecoins: For over half a decade, Visa has been facilitating crypto transactions and is now further expanding the applications for stablecoins with stablecoin-linked cards, settlement and programmable money. Bridge, a Stripe company, is working with Visa on a new card product that enables fintech developers to offer stablecoin-linked Visa cards to their end customers in multiple countries through a single API integration.
Flex Credential Expansion: Last year, Visa reinvented the card with the introduction of the Flex Credential, a next generation card that can seamlessly toggle between different payment methods (debit, credit, buy now, pay later). Today, millions of people around the world are using the Flex Credential and Visa plans to roll out new use cases like expanding access to lines of credit, investment accounts, rewards, commercial cards and more.
Unveiled today, Visa and Klarna are partnering to bring the Flex Credential to the U.S. and will be the first in Europe to offer a debit-to-buy now pay later use case that gives consumers more flexibility in how they pay. More details will be announced later this year.
Introducing More Ways to Pay and Get Paid: Visa is also announcing more ways for consumers, merchants and partners to pay and get paid around the world.Visa Pay is a new service designed to connect any participating wallet to any Visa-accepting merchant, local or international, in-store or online. Visa Pay is set for beta release in select markets in Asia, Europe and Latin America.
Visa Accept is a new offering to give micro-sellers a 'way to get paid' to their eligible Visa debit card, from any NFC-capable smartphone with just a few clicks, providing access to billions of credentials with just one card in your pocket. Visa Accept is being released for Visa beta partners in July, with the first activations in Latin America and Asia.