Visa and Mastercard Put Tokens in Charge of AI Commerce
Visa and Mastercard Put Tokens in Charge of AI Commerce
Publish Date: 2026-06-17 18:59:00
Source Domain: www.pymnts.com
- The race to build agentic commerce highlights the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) assistants in automating shopping decisions for consumers.
- A crucial layer in enabling this form of agentic commerce is token service providers (TSP), tasked with recognizing and authorizing AI agents to make purchases on behalf of consumers.
- Tokenization, traditionally seen as a fraud-reduction tool, is evolving to become a fundamental identity mechanism essential for verifying the legitimacy of AI agents in autonomous transactions.
- Consumer interest in agentic commerce is present, but there is significant concern around fraud and trustworthiness, which could be resolved by clearer fraud protection measures.
- TSPs play a pivotal role in creating a secure framework for agentic commerce by issuing and managing tokens that authorize AI agents to make purchases with predefined limits without exposing underlying payment details.
- Visa and Mastercard are leading the charge in establishing a trusted framework for autonomous transactions by developing mechanisms and partnerships to verify the origin and legitimacy of transactions from AI agents.
- The control over the authorization layer, which verifies transaction identities, is becoming a critical and potentially lucrative focus for companies aiming to facilitate and govern the expanding domain of agentic commerce.
