Payment giants are preparing for a world where AI agents book flights and shop for you

Singapore/San Francisco — In what payment executives are calling the next seismic shift in retail, financial giants Visa and Mastercard are spearheading the development of "agentic commerce"—a sy

stem where AI agents autonomously search, compare prices, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers within a chat interface. Early pilots are underway, with commercial deployment targeted for as early as the first quarter of 2026, promising a transformation more profound than the rise of e-commerce itself.

This evolution moves beyond current chatbots that can only browse. "We have gone from cash to digital, now we’re going from digital to intelligent," said Sandeep Malhotra of Mastercard. The technology would allow a user to ask an AI agent to, for example, "Find me the cheapest red-eye flight from Singapore to Tokyo under $500," with the bot handling the entire search, booking, and payment process using stored credentials, potentially even executing purchases when the user is offline.

Building the Trust and Security Framework

The race to enable this future is centered on solving critical issues of security, liability, and authentication. A primary focus is developing 'agentic tokens'—cryptographic systems to verify authorized AI agents and distinguish them from malicious bots. Visa launched its "Trusted Agent Protocol" with Cloudflare in October to create authenticated records for bot-initiated transactions, while also working on "payment signals" to give banks more detailed behavioral intelligence.

A major unresolved challenge is liability. The insertion of AI platforms as a fifth party in the traditional consumer-bank-merchant dispute chain creates complex questions about responsibility for errors, such as buying the wrong product or booking for the wrong date. "You almost have to assume mistakes will happen and create guardrails," said Visa's T.R. Ramachandran.

An Unavoidable Shift with High Stakes for Merchants

Demand is accelerating rapidly. A Visa survey found nearly half of the U.S. shoppers now use AI to aid shopping, and Adobe reported a 4,700% year-over-year increase in AI-driven traffic to retail sites in July. Tech companies are already moving: OpenAI launched an instant checkout feature, Perplexity partnered with PayPal, and Amazon is testing its own "Buy For Me" tool while blocking external AI bots from its site.

For merchants, this shift presents both immense pressure and a need for a profound strategic pivot. As AI-driven price comparison becomes ubiquitous, companies must adapt by creating their own AI agents, implementing verification, and redesigning loyalty and upsell strategies for an automated competitive ecosystem. The transition to agentic commerce represents the next high-stakes race for dominance in retail, one that payment networks are betting will redefine consumer habits in "months rather than years," demanding new strategic infrastructure across the entire commercial landscape.