Amazon and Visa team up to equip developers with tools for AI shopping agents, pushing agentic commerce forward as the industry races to define its future.
Amazon and Visa are joining forces to accelerate the next frontier in digital commerce: AI agents that can shop — and pay — autonomously on behalf of consumers.
In a joint announcement Monday, the companies said they will offer software developers a new suite of tools through Amazon Web Services to build “agentic commerce” experiences. The tools, which will connect developers to a wider ecosystem of payment and commerce partners, are designed to help AI agents complete transactions reliably and securely — though neither company disclosed when they will debut.
The partnership extends beyond retail. Amazon and Visa are also collaborating with Expedia Group and Intuit to bring agentic shopping and payment capabilities to travel and B2B applications, hinting at an emerging commercial layer where bots, not buyers, initiate and negotiate purchases.
Visa, long vocal about its ambitions in this space, has been signaling the arrival of AI-driven shopping agents since April, pointing to forthcoming Visa cards that allow autonomous payment authorization. “The pace of innovation is very fast — perhaps even accelerating,” Visa CFO Chris Suh said recently, noting the company’s investments across agentic commerce, stablecoin technology, and digital payments infrastructure.
The collaboration arrives amid an industry-wide race to capture the future of “bot-powered shopping.” PayPal, Fiserv, Stripe, and Mastercard are among the companies developing similar capabilities, each betting that AI agents will soon become a mainstream interface for retail and payments.
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But the road is far from frictionless. Real-world use cases remain rare, and major questions persist: What happens when an AI agent misinterprets a command? Buys the wrong item? Initiates a return? Who is responsible for errors made by autonomous decision-making?
Amazon is already contending with these questions in the courts. Last month, it filed a lawsuit against AI firm Perplexity over the use of autonomous assistants in its marketplace, underscoring how complex — and litigious — the transition to agentic shopping may become.
Still, the tech giants are pressing forward, betting that the convenience of digital agents will outweigh the operational and regulatory risks. If successful, the shift could redefine online shopping: consumers issuing commands, and AI doing the rest.
