Visa Inc. announced today its continued expansion into what the company calls “agentic commerce” with enhancements to its Visa Intelligent Commerce platform, an artificial-intelligence-based payments solution that allows AI agents to shop and make purchases.

Visa introduced the Intelligence Commerce platform in late April, providing developers with application programming interface resources for AI platforms and agents to interact with the company’s payment network.

Today, Visa announced two tools for its agentic commerce platform: a Model Context Protocol server, which allows developers to connect AI agents to the platform, and the pilot of the Visa Acceptance Agent Toolkit.

“Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf,” said Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell. “These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well.”

Agents are a type of AI software that go beyond the usual chatbot query-response capability of just replying with an image or text. They can perform complex multipart tasks with little or no human oversight. Agentic AI brings the role the artificial intelligence in everyday life closer to a technology that can both understand natural language instructions and then execute them using the tools at its disposal. It provides the framework for actively intelligent, action-taking AI assistants.

Visa said it envisions a near future where people will ask AI agents to perform payments and invoicing actions for them. To make this happen, there need to be tools that allow AI agents not just to browse the web and find shopping links for a user, as Google LLC and OpenAI are exploring, but also to make payments on their behalf.

The toolkit is built on top of the MCP server to provide a developer-friendly solution that simplifies the steps to building and connecting AI agents to Visa’s network. It can also be used directly via an AI software development kit.

An MCP server enables AI applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic PBC’s Claude, to connect to and use software tools without the need to write integration code. By opening up an MCP server, Visa is allowing AI agents to plug directly and securely into the company’s payment infrastructure, access APIs and test commerce actions.

The Visa Acceptance Agent Toolkit, now available in pilot, contains a broad workbook and integration library to allow developers and businesses to build AI apps with a jumpstart. It features prebuilt workflows for common commerce tasks, such as invoicing and pay-by-link. Additionally, it includes plain-language prompts that allow both professional developers and non-savvy users to trigger actions using simple commands.

For example, a merchant support agent could take action after being told, “Make me an invoice for $155.55 for John Doe, due Friday.” With the toolkit, the agent would call the Invoice API, enter the details and submit a secure payment. The company said no manual development would be required.

Similarly, an accountant or analyst could ask an agent to provide a summary of a week’s revenue across all invoices, including the unpaid ones. The agent could then securely retrieve the invoice information and report on the transaction data.

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