---
title: Consumers Are Using AI to Shop but Not Yet to Pay
description: Visa's CEO says consumers now shop with AI but will not yet let agents pay, as the card networks build agentic-payment rails ahead of trust and settled rules.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-09-10T15:50:07.843Z
updated: 2026-09-10T15:50:07.855Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/visa-ai-shopping-agentic-payments-not-yet
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/visa-ai-shopping-agentic-payments-275267.jpg
categories: FinTech
content_type: Analysis
region: Global
publication: Sovereign Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

Ryan McInerney, Visa's chief executive, told investors on Tuesday that consumers have begun shopping with artificial intelligence but are not yet ready to let it pay on their behalf. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, McInerney described a market that has taken to AI as a way to find and compare products while holding back from the one step that matters most to a payment network, authorizing a machine to move money.

"We are seeing adoption for shopping, but not yet for autonomous payments," McInerney said.

Retailers and startups have spent the past year adding AI assistants that browse catalogs, weigh options and assemble carts. McInerney placed the frontier one step short of checkout, at the point where a person has to decide whether an agent gets standing permission to spend. He pointed to substantial room left to grow across consumer payments, Visa's money-movement service Visa Direct, and higher-value cross-border business transactions, and said newer infrastructure, including cloud-based processing cores, tokens and stablecoins, is broadening what banks and fintechs can build on.

## Visa Is Building the Rails, and They Are Still in Pilot

Visa has organized its agent work under a program it calls Intelligent Commerce, which the company describes as its strategic portfolio for the age of AI agents and which embeds payment credentials, controls and authentication into automated buying. Visa states the core difficulty in its own materials, saying companies face growing challenges to securely authorize payments, manage risk and maintain trust when a transaction is started by an AI rather than a person.

The company's on-ramp for that world was [still in pilot months before McInerney spoke](https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2026/Visa-Opens-the-Door-to-AI-Driven-Shopping-for-Businesses-Worldwide/default.aspx). On April 8, 2026, Visa unveiled Intelligent Commerce Connect, a single-integration route into agentic commerce that it said was in pilot with select partners including Aldar, AWS, Highnote, Mesh and Payabli, with a wider rollout planned for later in the year. That timeline lines up with what McInerney told investors. The infrastructure that would let an agent pay is being built and tested, not yet switched on for the general public.

Visa is not alone in the effort. Rival networks including Mastercard and PayPal have launched their own agent-payment protocols over the past year, making this an industry-wide build-out rather than one company's bet.

## Shopper Trust in Handing AI a Wallet Remains Thin

Consumer confidence in letting AI manage money is low, which helps explain why the paying step lags the shopping one. A Gallup survey conducted with Edward Jones [found only about three in ten US adults have a great deal or some confidence in AI's expertise for managing money](https://fortune.com/2026/08/08/financial-advisers-trust-ai-usage-gap-gallup/), and just 3 percent have a great deal. About one in five people who sought financial advice in the past year turned to AI for it. Roughly eight in ten expressed at least some confidence in human financial advisers over the same period.

Those numbers describe money management rather than one-off purchases, but they map onto the same instinct McInerney identified. People will let software suggest what to buy well before they let it commit their funds without asking.

## The Rules for Agent Payments Have Not Caught Up

The legal and operational questions around agent-initiated payments are unsettled. When an autonomous agent makes a bad or fraudulent purchase, there is no settled answer to who bears responsibility among the agent platform, the wallet, the payment network and the merchant. The fraud signals that networks rely on to catch bots, such as typing cadence and device behavior, also disappear when the party transacting is a machine.

That unresolved question of liability is a large part of why Visa can run working rails in pilot and still tell investors that autonomous payment has not arrived. For now the shopping step is mainstream and the paying step is not, and both the networks and their regulators still have to settle who is liable before that changes.

## FAQ

**Q: What are agentic payments?**
Agentic payments are transactions an autonomous AI agent starts and completes on your behalf, rather than ones you click to buy yourself. Visa says its Intelligent Commerce program is designed to authorize these securely and manage the added risk.

**Q: What can an AI shopping assistant do for me right now?**
Today's assistants can search products, compare options and fill a cart, but you still approve and complete the payment. Letting an agent pay on its own, within limits you set, is being tested in pilots rather than offered widely.

**Q: Is it safe to let an AI agent use my card?**
That is the unsettled part. The rails being built include spend controls and authentication, but the rules for who is liable when an agent makes a bad or fraudulent purchase are not yet settled, which is one reason mainstream rollout has been cautious.