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Visa and Google are each rolling out sweeping upgrades to their agentic commerce platforms, accelerating the shift toward AI-powered shopping and payments.
The moves sharpen the focus on how to secure this new agentic commerce economy as it moves from experimental to everyday use.
Visa’s Latest Move
Visa’s latest move centres on its new Trusted Agent Protocol, an open, low-code standard designed to help merchants verify that the AI agents transacting on their sites are legitimate.
The tool forms a cornerstone of Visa Intelligent Commerce, the card network’s framework for enabling autonomous shopping and payments.
The suite already supports tokenisation, authentication, payment instructions and real-time signals — the plumbing that allows AI agents to book travel, reserve tickets or complete purchases using any of Visa’s 4.8 billion credentials.
The new protocol introduces cryptographic signatures unique to each agent, allowing merchants to distinguish genuine, consumer-authorised agents from fraudulent bots.
Crucially, it also preserves visibility of the human customer behind the agent, addressing a key concern among retailers wary of losing the direct relationship with shoppers.
Visa plans to pilot Intelligent Commerce across Asia Pacific by early 2026, alongside the rollout of Visa Pay and Scan to Pay — a set of features linking digital wallets and banking apps to Visa-accepting merchants globally.
Gemini Agentic Commerce
Google, meanwhile, is pushing agentic commerce deeper into the consumer experience, reshaping how people search, compare and buy products.
Powered by its expanded Shopping Graph — now more than 50 billion listings strong, with billions refreshed hourly — Google’s AI Mode in Search allows shoppers to describe their needs conversationally and receive structured, shoppable recommendations, comparison tables or visual inspiration.
The company is also extending these capabilities into the Gemini app, bridging idea-generation and actual purchasing in a single interface.
New agentic tools promise to remove traditional friction from shopping: Duplex-based calls to nearby stores to check stock and pricing; automated deal-hunting tied to a user’s budget; and, for eligible merchants, agentic checkout that can complete transactions via Google Pay once the shopper gives final approval.
Autonomous Agents
Together, Visa and Google are establishing the rails and interfaces for a world in which autonomous agents do much of the searching, selecting and paying.
Their respective strategies highlight a complementary divide: Visa is building trust and verification layers to support secure transaction processing at scale, while Google is reinventing the front-end experience that will generate those transactions in the first place.
The pace of progress suggests the agentic era is no longer a distant vision but an emerging commercial reality — one that merchants may need to embrace sooner than expected.
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