At Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, Visa ran live demonstrations of AI agents taking a shopper from product discovery through comparison to payment, all driven by natural-language prompts. The showcase was built jointly with Federal Bank, IndusInd Bank, RBL Bank, Cashfree Payments, CCAvenue, Juspay, Paytm Payments Services, PayU, Pine Labs and Razorpay, pulling much of India's payments ecosystem into the same experiment. For agent-to-agent commerce, it is a signal that the card network is treating machine-initiated spending as production infrastructure, not a lab demo.
Highlights#
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The demos mark a shift from AI helping shoppers find things to AI joining the transaction itself. A consumer describes what they want to a general-purpose assistant or a merchant's agent, which narrows options and moves toward checkout. Use cases spanned travel bookings, food ordering, lifestyle purchases and general online shopping, including smaller direct-to-consumer and MSME sellers.
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Visa kept authentication and consent at the center of the demos. The flows rely on its existing tokenisation and Visa Payment Passkey authentication so that an agent can do the legwork while the consumer stays in control, with human involvement where required.
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The company cited McKinsey estimates that AI agents could facilitate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global commerce transaction value by 2030, and positioned interoperable, secure payment experiences as the precondition for that shift.
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Suresh Sethi, Visa's Group Country Manager for India and South Asia, said trust will be critical as commerce becomes agent-driven, and that Visa is working with ecosystem partners on interoperable payment experiences that combine automation with transparency and consumer consent.
Why it matters#
Demos that run a full discover-compare-pay loop with real banks and payment processors are how agent payments move from protocol papers to rails. The open question, as before, is who verifies the counterparty when both ends of the wire are software, and where funds sit between commitment and delivery.