How Is Visa Shaping the Future of Commerce?

Visa used its Q2 2026 earnings call on April 28, 2026 to lay out a detailed commercial strategy for how a payments network becomes infrastructure for agentic commerce, and announced two products in an effort to make that strategy concrete.

The first is Intelligent Commerce Connect, described by CEO Ryan McInerney as a network, protocol, and token vault-agnostic on-ramp to agentic commerce for agent builders, merchants, and enablers.

The second is Visa CLI, a proof of concept that allows a developer to use their Visa credential to pay for digital services including images, website builders, and API calls, directly from a command-line interface.

McInerney described a near-future where the CLI itself becomes a commerce platform. "We see a world where we will all design, build, and launch digital products and experiences ourselves," he said, "and buy digital services using the CLI or a slick consumer-friendly version of one as our interface."

"The limiting factor for agentic commerce is trust," he said on the call. When users delegate purchasing decisions to AI agents, they will fall back on payment methods they already trust — ones that offer privacy, broad acceptance, issuer KYC, security protections, and in many cases rewards.

McInerney argued no other payment method delivers all of those features simultaneously, and that Visa's position as the trusted default for human buyers will transfer directly to agentic buyers.

According to the press release, the commercial logic extends across four dimensions McInerney outlined: acceleration of commerce digitisation, creation of significantly more transactions per purchase as agents split payments to optimise price and timing, acceleration of B2B payment automation through AI agents acting on invoices and contracts directly, and broader GDP growth estimated by third parties at 80 to 150 basis points of incremental uplift from AI.

Visa's own large transaction model which is a foundational LLM trained on billions of Visa transactions is now powering its fraud and risk services.

Early results show up to a 5x increase in fraud value capture compared to previous models. Six new dispute resolution capabilities have also been released across the VAS suite, according to the press release.

Demand for Visa's fraud products is accelerating. McInerney told analysts on the call that fraud is now a top three or four concern for CEOs of Visa's issuer, acquirer, and merchant clients globally.

"That just wasn't the case several years ago," he said. AI-embedded services including Smarter Stand-In Processing and Visa Provisioning Intelligence are seeing the fastest client adoption across all of Visa's value-added services.

Value-added services revenue grew 27% in constant dollars to $3.3 billion in Q2 2026, now representing 30% of total net revenue.