Visa demonstrates agentic commerce payments at GFF 2026

MUMBAI: The checkout counter may soon have an AI co-pilot, as Visa puts agentic commerce through its paces at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai.

The payments giant demonstrated live experiences in which AI agents can take consumers from product discovery and comparison to payment, all through natural-language prompts. The showcase, built with banks, fintechs and merchants, is designed to show how AI-led shopping could evolve without leaving security, authentication or consumer control at the door.

Visa worked with Federal Bank, IndusInd Bank, RBL Bank, Cashfree Payments, CCAvenue, Juspay, Paytm Payments Services, PayU, Pine Labs and Razorpay for the demonstrations.

The experiments mark a shift from AI simply helping shoppers find information to AI becoming part of the transaction itself. A consumer can start with a general-purpose large language model or a merchant’s AI agent, describe what they want in everyday language and have the agent narrow down options before moving towards a purchase.

Visa showcased use cases spanning travel bookings, food ordering, lifestyle purchases and online shopping, while demonstrating how the model could serve both large brands and smaller direct-to-consumer and MSME businesses.

But handing the shopping journey to an AI agent does not mean handing over the keys to the payment account. Visa has placed authentication and consent at the centre of its demonstrations, using its existing payment infrastructure, including tokenisation and Visa Payment Passkey-based authentication, to support authenticated transactions within AI-led experiences.

The company said the approach is intended to retain transparency and consumer control, with human involvement where required. In other words, the agent can do the legwork, but the consumer remains in the driver’s seat.

The potential prize is considerably larger than a few automated shopping trips. Citing McKinsey estimates, Visa said AI agents could facilitate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global commerce transaction value by 2030.

That prospect is putting payment networks, banks, fintechs and merchants on notice. As consumers increasingly rely on AI agents rather than navigating individual apps and websites themselves, the payments ecosystem will have to ensure that transactions remain secure while making the shift from human clicks to machine-led actions.

Visa’s Mumbai showcase brings multiple layers of India’s payments ecosystem into the same experiment, from banks and payment platforms to merchants and technology providers.

Suresh Sethi, Group Country Manager, India and South Asia, Visa, said trust would be critical as commerce becomes increasingly agent-driven. He said Visa was focused on combining automation with secure authentication, transparency and consumer consent while working with ecosystem partners to develop interoperable payment experiences.

The broader bet is clear: if AI agents are going to shop on consumers’ behalf, the payment rails will need to be ready for both human hands and machine prompts.