Latest news with #IntelligentCommerce
Forbes
07-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
What Visa's Big Bet On AI-Driven Commerce Means For The Future Of Shopping
Visa plans to revolutionize the shopping experience with its Intelligent Commerce solution. Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved What if your credit card could think for you? Visa just unveiled a bold new vision for the future of shopping. Imagine a world in which AI agents browse, buy, and manage purchases on your behalf. This is not a concept. It is happening now. At its first-ever Global Product Drop last week, Visa unveiled its sweeping 'Visa Intelligent Commerce,' initiative, which aims to reimagine how customers shop, pay, and interact with brands in an increasingly AI-driven world. Collaborating with major players like OpenAI, Perplexity, Mistral, Microsoft, and IBM, Visa made clear that it does not intend to sit on the sidelines of the generative AI revolution. Instead, the company is leaning in. Visa is opening up its payment infrastructure to developers, laying the groundwork for a new generation of AI-powered interactions. But what does this actually mean for the day-t0-day shopping experiences, and what are some broader implications for financial services and beyond? Visa's Intelligent Commerce is built around the concept of 'agentic AI." Put simply these are autonomous digital agents that can handle everything from browsing and selecting to buying and managing purchases. Think of a virtual assistant that knows your purchasing habits and can act accordingly without your constant supervision. Visa is collaborating with some of the larges tech platforms as part of its new initiatives. Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved Visa's AI-ready cards, which replace traditional card numbers with tokenized credentials, are central to this. These credentials authorize trusted AI agents to act on a consumer's behalf with security and identity verification built in. The result is an experience that is less 'simple, not seamless' according to CEO Ryan McInerney. This isn't theory. Visa is opening its payment rails and APIs to developers, effectively inviting the ecosystem to build the tools of this future, whether that is a personal travel planner, a smart grocery restocker, or a digital wardrobe curator. How AI-Driven Commerce is Pushing Incumbents to Act Like Startups For years, the consensus was that legacy financial institutions could not compete with startups on speed. Visa's Demo Day challenges that assumption. From the polished product launch format to the rapid collaboration with leading AI firms, Visa is showing it can move with startup-level agility when the stakes are high. Visa's Product Drop highlights how incumbents are rapidly catching up to early stage companies when ... More it comes to innovation. Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved This shift has meaningful implications for early-stage fintechs. Speed alone is no longer a defensible advantage. If a startup is not commercial-ready from day one, it may need to reassess its go-to-market strategy. As has been proven time and time again, many fintechs are not as innovative as they claim. Companies that are simply filling UX gaps should continue to expect to see larger players closing this gap more quickly than ever. The Ethics and Experience of AI-Driven Commerce Visa's vision of frictionless AI-powered shopping raises deeper questions about consumer agency and values. What happens when buying becomes automatic? Can brand loyalty survive when algorithms prioritize speed and convenience? To date, there is little infrastructure for expressing consumer values—such as preferences for cruelty-free or sustainable products—within AI agents. While platforms like Ethic and JustInvest have explored values-aligned investing, Visa's CPO Jack Forestell noted that this kind of preference expression is not yet in the product roadmap. But it should be. Capturing intent and aligning purchases with values could be the next major frontier in personalization. Financial Wellness and Era of AI-Driven Commerce The promise of Intelligent Commerce also brings inherent tensions. Visa emphasizes a number of user controls including spending limits, AI credential authorization, and real-time transaction signals. These features are designed to offer both security and peace of mind. But cynics will argue that Visa, like most payments platforms, profits from higher spend, not restrained consumption. AI is coming for your wallet. getty Yet there is strategic upside to encouraging long-term financial wellness. Consumers who feel Visa has their back may stay within its ecosystem longer, fostering brand loyalty in an era of commoditized payments. This aligns with a broader trend of platforms positioning themselves as 'financial wellness' partners, not just transaction enablers. The Real Estate Gap in AI Payments Notably missing from Visa's AI roadmap is real estate. The average American now spends nearly one third of their income on rent. This is an all-time high. Americans spend 30% of their income on rent. getty Despite attempts by startups like Bilt to make rent payments more accessible via credit, the sector remains fragmented. Bilt's success has required heavy capital and steep customer acquisition costs, raising the question: How long can first-mover advantage last? With 44 million U.S. households paying rent and the median mortgage payment hovering above $2,000, this is a massive blind spot in the AI commerce story. Until AI can manage recurring housing payments with the same ease as groceries or flights, the vision remains incomplete. Will AI Supplement or Supplant Human Touch? Visa's Intelligent Commerce imagines a world where AI handles our everyday transactions. But will that future eliminate the need for human input? Just as the rise of search did not kill curation, and mobile banking did not end branch relationships, agentic AI may supplement rather than supplant. There will still be demand for white-glove experiences, emotional nuance, and human judgment. This is likely to especially be true in high-stakes purchases or values-driven decisions. In the meantime, Visa has fired a clear signal: AI-driven commerce is not a distant future. It is a fast-arriving present. And incumbents are not just watching - they are building.
Business Wire
30-04-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
VGS Expands Partnership with Visa to Pioneer AI-Driven Commerce with Secure Payments Infrastructure
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--VGS, The World's Leader in Tokenization, is proud to announce an expansion of its successful, long-term partnership with Visa. Building on years of product partnership and shared achievements, VGS will be a preferred pilot partner with Visa through the Visa Intelligent Commerce program, helping to pioneer the future of AI commerce. Today, VGS powers 4.5B tokens globally, many of which are Visa cards, for some of the largest platforms, merchants, FIs, and fintechs in the world. Now, our long-standing strategic partnership for payments tokenization is evolving into foundational infrastructure to enable AI and Agent-driven commerce experiences, an emerging ecosystem often called Agentic Commerce. This evolution signifies a strengthened commitment from both organizations to leverage their respective strengths and expertise to deliver even greater and more secure payment outcomes for all commerce participants, from Merchants to Developers to Fintechs of all types around the world. 'We believe that tokenization unlocks payments in agentic commerce,' says VGS CEO, Chuck Yu. 'And we're excited to partner with Visa to establish secure payments infrastructure and benchmarks for agentic commerce designed to enable AI agents, acting on behalf of payers, to seamlessly discover, evaluate, and complete purchase transactions.' With both companies at the forefront of empowering agentic commerce and merchant platforms, Visa and VGS remain committed to collaborating on empowering agentic commerce to scale and grow. Read more about Visa Intelligent Commerce here: About VGS Founded in 2015, VGS is The World's Leader in Payment Tokenization and trusted credential management platform, depended on by Fortune 500 companies, merchants, fintechs, and banks alike. VGS' mission is to revolutionize the way sensitive data is stored and secured, enabling organizations to manage information across cards, bank accounts, and digital wallets with ease. VGS stores sensitive data and tackles critical payment acceptance challenges such as multi-PSP management, card issuance, payment orchestration enablement, PCI compliance, and the protection of personally identifiable information (PII). With over 4 billion tokens managed globally, VGS offers a comprehensive suite of solutions, including a composable Card Management Platform, a PCI-compliant Vault, and advanced network value-added services such as Network Tokens, Account Updater, and Card Attributes. Learn more at and by following VGS on LinkedIn. About Visa Visa (NYSE: V) is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere and see access as foundational to the future of money movement. Learn more at
