Visa CEO: AI Shopping Has Arrived, but Agentic Payments Haven't

Visa CEO Ryan McInerney said Tuesday (Sept. 8) at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference that consumers have begun using AI to shop, but they have not yet handed payment control to autonomous agents. He noted that users are leveraging platforms such as large language models to compare products and select items, but ultimately still jump to merchant websites to complete transactions.

McInerney attributed this bottleneck to a "trust" issue: merchants need to confirm that agents entering their sites are legitimate and authorized by consumers, while consumers must trust agents to handle funds and financial information. According to a Visa survey, three-quarters of consumers do not trust agent platforms to make payments autonomously; however, when asked if Visa were involved, 61% said they would be willing to trust them, and among consumers who use LLMs, that figure exceeded 70%.

McInerney also emphasized that consumer payments, Visa Direct, and high-value B2B cross-border transactions still represent substantial markets. Cloud-native cores, global issuing processing, tokens, and stablecoins are broadening the infrastructure available to banks and fintech companies.

Source: https://www.pymnts.com/visa/2026/visa-ceo-says-ai-shopping-has-arrived-but-agentic-payments-havent/