The retail industry has spent the past two years debating whether agentic commerce — AI systems that shop, compare, and purchase on a consumer's behalf — is real or hype. Meanwhile, the payment networks that would underpin every single one of those transactions have been quietly building the infrastructure to handle them. And they are very serious about it.
Both Visa and Mastercard have now launched competing frameworks for what they call "agentic payments" — the ability for AI agents to initiate and complete purchases on behalf of users, authenticated, tokenized, and settled through existing card rails. Digital Commerce 360 reported the competitive dynamics in early April, detailing how both companies are racing to become the default infrastructure layer for AI-driven commerce.
The Products Taking Shape
Mastercard's entry is called Agent Pay. Announced in April 2025 and now expanding aggressively, it provides an "Agent Pay Acceptance Framework" — a set of technical and governance standards that allow AI agents to transact within established card payment systems. The framework uses network tokenization, advanced authentication, and fraud controls to validate AI-initiated transactions without exposing sensitive card credentials.
This year, Mastercard executed what it called its first real-world agentic transaction in Hong Kong: an AI agent booked and paid for a rideshare from Hong Kong's airport using the Agent Pay protocol with HSBC acting as the partner bank. Mastercard's press release describes the system as giving consumers "complete control" over what the agent is allowed to purchase on their behalf.
Visa's competing program, Intelligent Commerce, gives developers APIs that plug identity verification, spending controls, and tokenized card credentials directly into AI agents. PYMNTS reports that Fiserv has now integrated Mastercard Agent Pay into its merchant acceptance infrastructure — meaning retailers using Fiserv's payment systems are already compatible with AI-initiated purchases.
American Banker covered both companies' expanded deployments this month, noting that Visa on Wednesday also announced an AI-supported dispute resolution program and a partnership with corporate payments company Ramp to automate business bill payments.
Why Retail Should Pay Close Attention
The stakes here go far beyond payments plumbing. The entity that controls the authentication layer for AI-initiated purchases effectively controls which products those agents can buy, from which merchants, under what constraints.
McKinsey projects that AI agents could be responsible for $1 trillion in U.S.-based transactions by 2030. If that projection is even directionally correct, the payment frameworks being built right now will define how a significant portion of retail commerce is structured for the next decade.
For retailers, the immediate practical question is: are your checkout systems compatible with agent-initiated transactions? Merchants that support tokenized payments and accept Visa Intelligent Commerce or Mastercard Agent Pay tokens will be accessible to AI shopping agents. Those that don't may find themselves excluded from a growing share of automated purchases — especially as Amazon's Rufus and Walmart's Sparky expand "buy for me" functionality.
The Stripe angle adds another dimension: when Stripe announced expanded support for agentic payment capabilities via its Shared Payment Tokens program in March, it named both Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay as partners, alongside Affirm and Klarna. That positions Stripe as an interoperability layer between the competing networks — which could accelerate adoption by giving merchants a single integration point.
The Control Question Retailers Need to Ask
Traditional retail commerce gave the customer the buy button. Agentic commerce gives that button to an AI model. The payment network controls the token. The platform that hosts the AI agent — Amazon, Google, Apple, OpenAI — controls the decision logic. The merchant gets the order.
That's a very different power structure than today's e-commerce. And with Visa and Mastercard now deeply embedded in the architecture of how AI agents are authenticated and authorized, the payment rails may end up having more influence over what gets purchased than the marketing teams at any individual retailer.
The race to control the buy button isn't about clicks anymore. It's about who gets to be trusted infrastructure — and both Visa and Mastercard are making clear they intend to be exactly that.