Visa and AWS launch partnership to build infrastructure for agentic commerce with secure payments

Agent coordination is the missing piece in AI commerce -- new AWS and Visa blueprints target the gap

With some needed infrastructure now being developed for agentic commerce, enterprises will want to figure out how to participate in this new form of buying and selling. But it remains a fragmented Wild West with competing payment protocols, and it's unclear what enterprises need to do to prepare. More cloud providers and AI model companies will start providing enterprises with the tools needed to begin building systems that enable agentic commerce. AWS, which will list Visa's Intelligence Commerce platform on the AWS Marketplace, believes that making it easier to connect to tools that enable agentic payments would accelerate the adoption of agentic commerce. While this doesn't mean Amazon has formally adopted Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), which would bring the world's largest e-commerce platform to the agentic shopping space, it does show just how agentic commerce is fast becoming an area enterprises want to focus on. Scott Mullins, AWS managing director of Worldwide Financial Services, told VentureBeat in an email that listing the platform "makes payment capabilities accessible" in a secure manner that quickly integrates with Visa's system. "We're giving developers pre-built frameworks and standardized infrastructure to eliminate major development barriers," Mullins said. He added that the idea is to list Visa's platform to streamline integration with AWS services like Bedrock and AgentCore. In addition to listing the Visa Intelligence Commerce platform on AWS Marketplace, the two companies will also publish blueprints to the public Bedrock AgentCore repository. Mullins said this will "significantly reduce development time and complexity that anyone can use to create travel booking agents, retail shopping agents and B2B payment reconciliation agents." The Visa Intelligence Commerce platform will be MCP-compatible, allowing enterprises to connect agents running on it to other agents. What enterprises need to know Through the Visa Intelligence Commerce platform, AWS customers can access authentication, agentic tokenization and data personalization tools. These allow organizations to register and connect their agents to Visa's payment infrastructure. The platform helps mask credit card details through tokenized digital credentials and lets companies set guidelines for agent transactions, like spending limits. Rubali Birwadker, senior vice president and global head of Growth at Visa, said in a press release that bringing the platform to AWS lets it scale, "helping to unlock faster innovation for developers and better experiences for consumers and businesses worldwide." Mullins said Visa and AWS are helping provide the foundational infrastructure for developers and businesses to push for agentic commerce projects, but for this to work, developers must coordinate several agents and understand the different needs of industries. "Real-world commerce often requires multiple agents working together," Mullins said. "The Travel Booking Agent blueprint, for instance, connects flight, hotel, car rental, and train providers to deliver complete travel journeys with integrated payments. Developers need to design coordination patterns for these complex, multi-agent workflows." Different use cases also have different needs, so enterprises need to plan carefully around existing infrastructure. This is where the MCP connection is vital, since it will enable communication between an organization's agents to Visa's platform while maintaining identity and security. Blueprints for agentic commerce Mullins said the biggest stumbling block for many enterprises experimenting with agentic commerce is the fragmentation of commerce systems, which creates integration challenges. "This collaboration will address these challenges by providing reference architecture blueprints that developers can use as starting points, combined with AWS's cloud infrastructure and Visa's trusted payment network to create a standardized, secure foundation for agentic commerce," he said. The reference blueprints would give a framework for enterprise developers, solution architects and software vendors to follow when building these new workflows. Mullins said the blueprints are being developed in coordination with Expedia Group, Intuit and the Eurostars Hotel company. The blueprints will work with the Visa Intelligent Commerce MCP server and APIs and will be managed through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. AWS said that its goal is to "enable a foundation for agentic commerce at Scale, where transactions are handled by agents capable of real-time reasoning and coordination." These blueprints would eventually become composable, reusable workflows for any organization looking to build travel booking agents or retail shopping agents. These don't have to be consumer-focused agents; there can also be agents buying flights for employees. Agentic commerce marches forward Agentic commerce, where agents do the product searching, cart adding and payments, is fast becoming the next frontier for AI players. Companies like OpenAI and Google have come out with AI-powered shopping tools to make it easier to surface products and for agents to find them. Browsers like OpenAI's Atlas and Comet from Perplexity also play a role in connecting agents to websites. Retailers like Walmart and Target have also integrated into ChatGPT, so users can ask the chatbot to search for items through chat. One of the biggest problems facing the adoption of agentic commerce revolves around enabling safe, secure transactions. OpenAI and Stripe launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) in September, following Google's announcement of Agent Pay Protocol (AP2) in collaboration with American Express, Mastercard, PayPal, Salesforce and ServiceNow. Visa followed soon after with TAP, which connects to the Visa Intelligent Commerce platform. "The foundation is now in place through this collaboration, but successful agentic commerce requires thoughtful design that considers the specific needs of industry, users and existing systems while leveraging the standardized infrastructure and blueprints now available," Mullins said.

Visa reckons agents are a good thing, but remember to lay down groundrules like you would with a kid when trusting AI with your money

How times change. According to Oliver Jenkyn, Group President of Global Markets at financial services giant Visa: For the first 20+ years of digital commerce, bots or agents were a bad thing and we were constantly trying to stop them. Now agents are showing up, and it's a good thing. As evidence of that Visa has just partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to put its Visa Intelligent Commerce platform on the AWS Marketplace. The move involves both tools and open blueprints that enable intelligent agentic workflows and AI-powered digital transactions, aimed at providing greater enterprise access to core agentic payment features, such as authentication, agentic tokenisation, and intent capture. AWS and Visa will also publish blueprints on the public Amazon Bedrock AgentCore repository, produced in partnership with companies, including Expedia Group, Intuit and Eurostars Hotels. The blueprints are designed to work with Visa's platforms and APIs to enable secure, tokenized payments via the Visa Intelligent Commerce MCP server and managed through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Speaking at the UBS Global Technology and AI Conference this week gave Jenkyn the chance to go into more detail about Visa's agentic intentions and the evolution of the ongoing payments sector: If you go back in the history of payments, it used to be face-to-face commerce. You showed up in a store and you had a Visa card. Then e-commerce showed up and we set protocols and standards for how it would work and e-commerce was great for us and for consumers and merchants. Then mobile commerce came around, different set of protocols, different set of standards, different set of security. We set those protocols and procedures in place, and that went nicely. And now it's all about agentic tech, he notes: What we're focused on is the standards, the protocols, the risk, the fraud, the trust to make sure that there's that next wave of growth in agentic. And we're super excited about it, and we're doing the hard work now to make it so. Not nice PowerPoints and presentations, but the really hard work to sort of weld it into the system of how agentic commerce will work going forward...I think agentic is going to be a very positive thing for Visa. We feel really good about agentic commerce and the possibilities that it brings. He illustrated his point by pitching a scenario where a user would open up ChatGPT on their call phone and hit a button on the screen at the top that says, 'Shop for me': When you hit that button, three things happen. The first thing is you load a credential into ChatGPT, so it has a way to pay for you, authenticated tokenized secure domain control. The second thing you do is you personalize it to you. So you give it a data token on my past transaction behavior, my past purchase behavior. Maybe I put some of my family stuff in there. So it's not just an LLM looking out of the world of what it could buy, it's actually looking back into my brain of like what would Oliver buy in this situation because I've given it that history. And the third thing that happens is you put controls around it. So if it's under $100 in these merchant categories, go ahead and buy it. If it's in these merchant categories, fashion and travel, let me look at it before you actually hit buy. If it's in these merchant categories or above $1,000, you do not have permission to buy for me. So you put controls around it. There's a simple way to think about this process, he suggests: If you ask your kid to go down to the store to get something for you, you have to give your kid a way to pay. They know to not get the full fat milk, they know to get the skim milk because they know you. And you tell them that they can't go buy chocolate and cigarettes with the money that you gave them, they've actually just got to go buy the milk, right? So those are controls that you're giving to an agent as if you were to child. This means that cryptographic protocols are needed so that when an agent shows up, a merchant knows, that this is someone that is recognized and known, someone that has an intent to purchase, and an agent with whom payment credentials can be exchanged. Or as Jenkyn puts it: We have protocols to enable the sort of separation of good agents from like bad bots. As we've seen of late with the likes of Paypal, the rise of agentic AI opens up new possibilities for how the payment industry will operate. Inevitably digital commerce veterans like Visa are going to be part of this evolution. Separately this week Visa released the results of a study of 1,000 US adults suggesting that AI has become mainstream among shoppers this year. Nearly half of those polled - 47% - say they have used an AI tool for at least one shopping task, with finding gift ideas ranking as the top AI-assisted use. When it comes to agentic commerce, price comparison is cited as athe most compelling application. But trust issues come to the fore pretty sharply with 60% wanting to better understand how AI-powered shopping tools use their personal data and 66% saying they are worried friends or family could fall victim to an online scam this Holiday season. The question for all payment providers is how quickly and effectively they have a solution that their users can trust with their bank accounts. Paypal argues that it has "an incredible right to win" here, an attitude that will be put to the test pretty darn quickly. The likes of Visa have far longer and more-established commerce credentials. Will that be enough to tip the balance in their favor? Remember, there was once a time when customers were scared of the idea of getting money out of an ATM. Every evolution takes time to take hold.

Visa and AWS join forces on agentic commerce

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. Unveiled earlier this year, Visa Intelligent Commerce is the payment giant's platform for helping AI to find and buy. Now the technology is coming to the AWS Marketplace, offering users access to critical agentic payment tools like authentication, agentic tokenisation, data personalisation, and user intent capture. AWS and Visa will also publish blueprints on the public Amazon Bedrock AgentCore repository designed for multi-network agentic retail shopping, travel booking, and payment reconciliation, enabling developers to create and connect complex workflows. The firms are already working with various industry partners including Expedia Group, Intuit, lastminute.com, Eurostars Hotel Company, and others as part of the blueprint design and reviews. The blueprints are designed for developers and others who want to accelerate the creation of agentic commerce workflows. Each blueprint is designed to work with the Visa Intelligent Commerce MCP Server and APIs, enabling secure, tokenised, and contextual payments. Rubail Birwadker, SVP, global head of growth, Visa, says: "With AWS's scalable cloud capabilities and Visa's global payment network, Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI agents to transact securely and contextually at scale -- helping to unlock faster innovation for developers and better experiences for consumers and businesses worldwide." David Richardson, VP, AgentCore, AWS, adds: "Through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Visa's secure agentic commerce APIs and MCP server in the AWS Marketplace, we are going to make it super simple for AWS customers to build and deploy agents and agent tools."

Amazon and Visa Team to Boost Agentic Commerce | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. To that end, the companies announced Monday (Dec. 1) the launch of a partnership that will see Visa list its Intelligence Commerce platform in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace. "Agentic commerce needs trust to move from intent to action; Visa Intelligent Commerce is designed to be the trust layer for the agent economy and together with Visa Acceptance can provide the infrastructure for secure, network-agnostic transactions," Rubail Birwadker, senior vice president and global head of growth for Visa, said in a news release. "With AWS's scalable cloud capabilities and Visa's global payment network, Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI agents to transact securely and contextually at scale -- helping to unlock faster innovation for developers and better experiences for consumers and businesses worldwide," Birwadker said. According to the release, the effort is aimed at helping developers and businesses connect to a growing number of artificial intelligence agentic commerce providers for secure and reliable payment experiences. Visa and AWS say they will also publish blueprints on the public Amazon Bedrock AgentCore repository built for multi-network agentic retail shopping, travel booking and payment reconciliation, allowing developers to create and connect complex workflows. "Through this collaboration, AWS and Visa are committed to advancing agentic workloads and commerce capabilities on AWS, with Visa deploying MCP tools to help enable fully integrated, end-to-end agentic commerce solutions on the platform," the release added. Partners in this effort include Expedia, Intuit, lastminute.com, Eurostars Hotel Company and others, the companies said. The collaboration comes at a time when artificial intelligence continues to transform the shopping experience. And as covered in a recent PYMNTS Intelligence report, "Agents of Change: How Agentic AI Is Redefining Commerce," agentic models, in which artificial intelligence handles things like browsing, comparing prices, accommodating preferences and making purchases, simplify the process even further. "Major payments and FinTech firms are accelerating investments to capture this opportunity," the report said. "Many consumers are ready for this shift. In fact, nearly half (45%) would be comfortable allowing AI agents to complete purchases on their behalf. Among Gen Z consumers, that figure rises to a majority share (54%)." A number of retailers are readying themselves for this shift, while those who aren't run the risk of falling behind. This transformation is already happening, with AI companies such as OpenAI, Perplexity, Google and Microsoft, along with Amazon, introducing features in which autonomous agents can complete shoppers' orders. "As such, merchants are looking to adapt to make their products more findable by AI systems," PYMNTS wrote.