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

Visa and AWS Build Foundation for AI-Powered Shopping

Visa has partnered with AWS to list its Visa Intelligent Commerce platform on the AWS Marketplace, marking a significant step toward standardizing agentic commerce infrastructure 1

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. The collaboration gives developers access to authentication, agentic tokenization, and data personalization tools needed to build AI agents capable of autonomous shopping and payments 3

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. According to Rubali Birwadker, senior vice president and global head of growth at Visa, the platform "enables AI agents to transact securely and contextually at scale" 4

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The partnership addresses a critical gap in digital commerce. While AI agents promise to handle browsing, price comparison, and purchases on behalf of consumers, the ecosystem remains fragmented with competing payment protocols 1

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. Scott Mullins, AWS managing director of Worldwide Financial Services, told VentureBeat that listing the platform "makes payment capabilities accessible" while providing "pre-built frameworks and standardized infrastructure to eliminate major development barriers" 1

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Developer Blueprints Enable Complex Multi-Agent Workflows

Visa and AWS will publish developer blueprints on the public Amazon Bedrock AgentCore repository, designed for multi-network agentic retail shopping, travel booking agents, and payment reconciliation 3

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. These blueprints are being developed in coordination with Expedia Group, Intuit, lastminute.com, and Eurostars Hotel Company 1

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. The reference architectures will "significantly reduce development time and complexity that anyone can use to create travel booking agents, retail shopping agents and B2B payment reconciliation agents," according to Mullins 1

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The blueprints work with the Visa Intelligent Commerce MCP server and APIs, enabling secure and tokenized transactions managed through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore 3

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. Real-world commerce often requires multiple AI agents working together. The Travel Booking Agent blueprint, for instance, connects flight, hotel, car rental, and train providers to deliver complete journeys with integrated payments 1

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. This coordination capability is vital as enterprises need agents that can communicate while maintaining identity and security across different systems.

Trust and Control Define the Agent Economy

Oliver Jenkyn, Group President of Global Markets at Visa, explained how the company's approach to agentic commerce has evolved: "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" 2

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. Speaking at the UBS Global Technology and AI Conference, Jenkyn outlined three critical elements for agentic commerce: loading authenticated credentials through tokenization, personalizing agents with transaction history and preferences, and setting spending limits and merchant category controls 2

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The platform helps mask credit card details through tokenized digital credentials and lets companies set guidelines for agent transactions 1

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. Birwadker noted that "agentic commerce needs trust to move from intent to action; Visa Intelligent Commerce is designed to be the trust layer for the agent economy" 4

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. A recent Visa study of 1,000 US adults found that 47% have used an AI tool for at least one shopping task, with price comparison cited as the most compelling application for agentic commerce 2

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. However, 60% want better security and control mechanisms before fully embracing AI-driven transactions 2

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Infrastructure Challenges and Enterprise Readiness

The biggest stumbling block for enterprises experimenting with agentic commerce is the fragmentation of commerce systems, which creates integration challenges 1

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. The Visa Intelligent Commerce platform will be MCP-compatible, allowing enterprises to connect agents running on it to other agents across different systems 1

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. Through the platform, AWS customers can access authentication, agentic tokenization and data personalization tools that allow organizations to register and connect their agents to Visa's payment infrastructure 1

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David Richardson, VP of AgentCore at AWS, stated that "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" 3

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. The collaboration provides reference architecture blueprints that enterprise developers, solution architects and software vendors can follow when building AI-powered payment workflows 1

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. As major AI companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, Google and Microsoft introduce features where autonomous agents can complete orders, merchants need to adapt quickly to make their products findable by AI systems 4

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. The infrastructure being built today will determine which enterprises can participate effectively in this shift toward agent-driven shopping.