Executives expect AI agent-led shopping to blow up in 2026

Payments giant Visa and Mastercard are creating a payment system that will let AI agents search, compare prices, book items, and even pay for users in the same chat, calling the system “agentic commerce.”

Apparently, this is the next phase of online buying. Sandeep Malhotra, Mastercard EVP for Core Payments in Asia Pacific, said, “A big change in commerce happened when payments left stores and went online. Now payments are becoming intelligent.” He added that:- “We went from cash to digital, and now from digital to intelligent.”

AI agents complete shopping and payments inside chat

Reportedly, agentic commerce will also change how prices get discovered, since agents scan everything at once.

One early use case is travel. A user can ask an AI agent to find the cheapest overnight flight from Singapore to Tokyo under $500 with no stops. The agent searches, shows options, books the seat, and pays using stored credentials.

Malhotra said users could also let agents buy items while they are offline, such as snapping up a product once the price hits a set limit.

Visa and Mastercard execs say these systems will run on AI platforms people already use, like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, plus bank apps and merchant bots.

Large retailers are not waiting around. Some fear losing direct customer access and pricing power. Amazon started testing “Buy For Me” this year while blocking outside AI agents from crawling its site. Merchants are testing their own bots to stay in the loop.

Visa and Mastercard have launched pilot frameworks to secure bot-led payments with selected users and merchants. T.R. Ramachandran, Visa APAC Head of Products and Solutions, allegedly said that commercial use of secure, personalized agent payments could start as early as the first quarter of 2026.

Data backs that up. A December Visa survey found nearly half of U.S. shoppers now use AI to help shop, from gift searches to price checks. Adobe data showed AI-driven retail traffic in the U.S. jumped 4,700% in July from a year earlier.

Payment companies are also creating agentic tokens that cryptographically prove which bots are allowed to act for humans.

In October, Cryptopolitan reported that Visa had launched its Trusted Agent Protocol with Cloudflare to authenticate bot-started transactions. Ramachandran said Visa will also add payment signals for banks, giving more detail and using behavior data to confirm agents.

Liability is another issue. AI can buy the wrong item or book the wrong date. Today, disputes involve four parties. Ramachandran said a fifth has entered the chain. “AI platforms are now part of the value chain because customers want them there,” he said. “You have to assume mistakes will happen and put protection around that.”

Payment executives say merchants will need agent verification, their own bots to talk to consumer agents, new loyalty tools, and different upsell plans. Malhotra said, “Consumers will get better access to information, goods, and services.” Ramachandran said adoption is coming fast. “Based on platform adoption, we are talking months, not years.”

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