AI-driven traffic to retail websites has surged over 4,700% in a year and today’s payment systems still can’t reliably distinguish helpful assistants from hostile bots. Visa’s new Intelligent Commerce platform for Asia Pacific is its attempt to get ahead of that shift, laying the groundwork before AI becomes the primary initiator of online shopping.
Why APAC?
By piloting the platform in early 2026, Visa is effectively setting a deadline. Asia Pacific, with its mobile-first consumer base, becomes the testing ground for a future where AI, not humans, drives a growing share of purchases.
At the centre of the platform is the Trusted Agent Protocol, a cryptographic identity layer that allows merchants to verify whether an AI agent is acting with real consumer authorisation. Traditional fraud systems, built to analyse human behaviour, can’t decode machine-speed interactions or algorithmic purchasing patterns.
Visa’s ecosystem partnerships, from Microsoft and Stripe to Tencent, offer a preview of what AI-native commerce will demand: coordinated authentication across platforms and seamless handoffs between AI agents researching, planning, and completing transactions. Imagine an assistant booking an entire trip across multiple services without sacrificing security or transparency.
What Visa is constructing is more than another layer of payment technology. It’s the connective framework for an ecosystem where consumers, AI agents, and merchants interact through verified, transparent, machine-speed transactions. As T.R. Ramachandran, who leads products and solutions for Asia Pacific, has emphasised, agentic commerce will only scale if the system runs on unified standards and shared trust. The Intelligent Commerce platform, anchored by the Trusted Agent Protocol, is designed to provide exactly that.
The implications for digital commerce are far-reaching. Merchants optimised for human browsing will need to rebuild their systems for AI-driven decision-making. Those who adapt early will gain fluency in agentic transactions; those who wait may find themselves overwhelmed when adoption surges.
