AGENTIC commerce, where artificial intelligence (AI)-powered agents can help consumers research and eventually complete purchases on their behalf, will be the next major shift in the global payments industry, Visa said.
Although its widespread adoption in the Philippines is still at an early stage, Visa executives told a briefing on Thursday that agentic commerce would be the natural evolution of payments, which has moved from face-to-face transactions to e-commerce and mobile payments.
With digital wallets becoming more common, including the recent rollout of Google Wallet and Google Pay in the Philippines, Visa said agentic commerce would be the next frontier in how consumers pay for goods and services.
“It's one of the macro shifts and macro trends,” Visa value-added services head Axel Boye-Moller told reporters.
Visa said the use of AI agents was already gaining traction globally, but for now these tools were mainly being used to help consumers discover products and conduct research rather than complete transactions end-to-end.
Boye-Moller said full realization of agentic commerce would depend on how quickly the industry agrees on shared standards.
“[F]or agentic commerce to really happen end-to-end and usually when something needs to scale in payments, it has to be on industry standards,” he said.
Visa Philippines Country Manager Jeffrey Navarro said they needed to ensure that transactions involving AI agents were conducted safely and securely.
Pilot programs related to agent-driven transactions are already underway in parts of the Americas and insights from these will help shape future deployments in other regions, including Asia-Pacific.
In the Philippines, Navarro said discussions with regulators, including the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, had yet to formally start as agentic commerce was still a relatively new concept. However, Visa expects regulatory conversations to take place once there is clearer traction and use cases in the local market.
“We're going to talk about it also with the central bank as and when we feel that there's traction already in the Philippines. But I think what's very important is being ready,” he said.
Even if agentic commerce takes time to take root in the Philippines, Navarro stressed that foundational security measures such as tokenization and passkeys were already critical for preventing fraud and protecting consumers.
These technologies, he added, are essential regardless of how quickly agentic commerce becomes mainstream.
“I think a lot of these discussions are happening within our global offices, product center groups ... it's really relatively new and to us, we're very excited with any innovation because ultimately, it makes the consumer experience better,” Navarro said.