Visa has announced a new platform designed to bring businesses into the growing world of AI-driven commerce. Called Intelligent Commerce Connect, the system is described as a network, protocol, and token vault-agnostic on-ramp for AI agent builders and merchants. The announcement was made on Wednesday and positions Visa as a central infrastructure provider for agentic payments. The platform allows AI agents acting on behalf of consumers to browse, select, and complete purchases autonomously.
According to Visa, the platform supports both Visa and non-Visa card payments and is compatible with major AI agent protocols. Through a single integration via the Visa Acceptance Platform, the system handles payment initiation, tokenization, spend controls, authentication, and PCI compliance. Merchant catalogs are also made discoverable within AI platforms through the same integration. The company says this makes it a universal entry point for businesses looking to participate in agentic commerce.
The platform is currently in a pilot phase with select partners, with a broader rollout planned for later in 2026. This is not Visa’s first move in the agentic payments space. In March, the company announced an experimental product called Visa CLI, which allowed AI agents to make same-day payments. Wednesday’s announcement builds on that earlier effort with a more comprehensive and merchant-facing infrastructure.
Visa is not alone in pursuing this market. Crypto networks such as Ethereum, Tron, and Solana, along with various fintech firms, have also been positioning themselves as payment rails for AI agents operating on behalf of consumers. The competition reflects growing industry interest in enabling autonomous, machine-initiated financial transactions at scale.
In a related development, AI fintech firm Nevermined announced an integration with Intelligent Commerce Connect using Coinbase‘s x402 protocol. The integration enables AI agents to purchase digital goods and services independently. Users can enroll their Visa card and define spending rules, while AI agents transact within those boundaries and merchants receive payments through their existing processors.
Erik Reppel, the creator of the x402 protocol, described the significance of the integration. “x402 gives agents an open standard to request payment programmatically, and this launch demonstrates how that can work alongside secure card infrastructure to enable real commercial transactions between AI agents and merchants,” he said. According to the x402 protocol website, the system has processed $24 million in transactional volume over the past 30 days, indicating meaningful early adoption.
Originally reported by CoinTelegraph.
