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During a media briefing at the Singapore Expo, Visa announced their increased role in enabling digital commerce, and the integration of AI and tokenisation technology. Significantly, the company is expanding its unified ecosystem and agentic commerce capability in anticipation of a new era of AI-powered agents shopping and paying on behalf of consumers.
T.R. Ramachandran, Head of Products and Solutions in APAC also demonstrated Visa Intelligent Commerce works, highlighting the friction of incomplete payment flows when consumers shop online.
“With Visa Intelligent Commerce and its cornerstone, Trusted Agent Protocol, Visa is connecting consumers, AI agents and merchants through secure, scalable solutions. This ensures every interaction is verified and transparent, empowering all parties of the purchase to embrace this future with confidence,” he said.
Anticipating the AI-ready commerce ecosystem
Since late 2024, ecommerce player, Amazon, has blocked external AI agents from accessing their marketplace, citing reasons like a degraded customer experience, unauthorised access, and more. The e-commerce player is also developing its own in-house AI shopping agents, signalling that it wishes to keep tight control rather than allow open agent access from outside platforms, especially those designed for automated shopping and browsing (ie. Perplexity’s Comet).
That being said, Amazon’s stance is to still collaborate with agents and bots that operate transparently and with explicit permission from Amazon.
This is where Visa, Mastercard, and even American Express, and their respective ecosystems, play a role.
Competing frameworks?
Visa and Mastercard have both unveiled new frameworks designed to advance agentic commerce, aiming to help merchants verify and accept trusted AI agents for online shopping and payments. These frameworks use Cloudflare’s Web Bot Auth technology, co-developed with partners like Microsoft, Shopify, Checkout.com, Worldpay, and Adyen, to support AI agents in transacting securely and efficiently across millions of merchants.
The technology enables merchants to confirm shopper intent, securely transmit payment credentials, and recognise authorised agents with less friction at checkout.
How can e-ecommerce platforms like Amazon’s ensure the bots they give access to, can be trusted?
According to Visa’s press release, Trusted Agent Protocol is a cornerstone of Visa Intelligent Commerce, a new ecosystem-led framework designed by Visa to provide merchants the much-needed assurance in an AI-driven world.
The statement goes like this: “The Trusted Agent Protocol enables merchants to recognise and verify trusted AI agents with genuine commerce intent, addressing a key concern as online traffic from AI agents grows. It uses agent-specific cryptographic signatures to ensure secure, verified transactions to prevent fraud by distinguishing legitimate agents from malicious bots, and helps to maintain visibility of the consumer behind the agent.”
Also, merchants are able to integrate seamlessly with the protocol via open and low-code methods, bypassing the need to overhaul their infrastructure just so they can leverage it.
The unfolding commerce landscape
According to Visa, AI-driven traffic to retail websites has surged over 4,700%, and 85%of shoppers who have used AI to shop say it improved their shopping experience. As a result, retailers and payment networks are under growing pressure to adapt their trust and verification systems to fit this new, agent-led model.
To address this, Visa is advancing its infrastructure, standards, and capabilities to power AI-driven commerce, opening new opportunities for consumers across Asia Pacific. Collaborating with the ecosystem, Visa’s vision for an interconnected environment where AI agents and payment players work together to offer trusted commerce experiences, is clear.
This experience is on the horizon and fast approaching with plans for Visa Intelligent Commerce pilots across the APAC region as the industry and regulatory readiness advances, by early 2026.
Cat Yong is Editor-in-Chief of Enterprise IT News, a regional news website which began in Malaysia circa 2011. A common theme in all of her work - opinions, analysis, features and more - is how technology and innovation drives business and outcomes.
A career tech journalist for 22 years, her work has evolved to also encompass narratives of tech powering human potential.
