Agent Commerce Accelerates, Reshaping the Competitive Logic of the Payments Industry

Research from Accenture, Visa, and Mastercard shows that AI agents are advancing from product search and recommendations into price comparison, payment method selection, and transaction initiation, turning 'agent commerce' into a new competitive variable for the payments industry.

In this model, users pre-set budgets, permissions, and preferences. AI agents can then choose among different payment rails—including card, account-to-account transfers, instant payments, and stablecoins—based on factors such as fees, speed, rewards, reliability, and merchant acceptance.

However, agent-based payments are still in their early stages. Most transactions require pre-authorization from the user or confirmation at key steps, and the underlying funds primarily flow through existing payment networks. While machine-to-machine payments have already appeared in real transactions for micro-payments such as API calls, data purchases, and computing power procurement, they have not yet scaled across the broader payments market.

As AI gains more payment authority, agent identity verification, proof of user authorization, spending limits, real-time risk control, and end-to-end audit trails will become critical infrastructure. Know Your Agent (KYA) is emerging as an important industry direction, but it remains in the standard-setting phase and has yet to form globally unified rules.