Industry News

The biggest moves in AI commerce, agentic payments, and the shift from search to conversation.

Visa lets agents shop and pay for you.

Visa predicts millions of consumers will use AI agents to complete purchases by the 2026 holiday season. With 100+ partners building in its sandbox, Visa is laying the rails for a world where agents handle checkout end-to-end.

visa.com

Stripe makes every business agent-sellable.

A single integration lets businesses become discoverable and transactable across AI agents. Coach, Kate Spade, URBN, Etsy, and Wix are among the first to go live — making their products buyable inside conversations.

stripe.com

Google ships an open protocol for agent payments.

AP2 is an open protocol for secure, agent-led payments — built on cryptographically signed mandates so AI agents can transact on behalf of users with a verifiable record. Adyen, PayPal, American Express, Mastercard, and Coinbase are among the first wave.

cloud.google.com

Mastercard builds the trust layer for agent commerce.

Mastercard is building the trust layer — verifying that AI agents are legitimate, strengthening authentication, and reducing fraud before agentic commerce scales. Their Agentic Tokens tie transactions to individual users so agents can pay without exposing credentials.

mastercard.com

OpenAI puts ads in ChatGPT.

Sponsored products now appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses for free and Go-tier users in the U.S. — matched to the conversation topic. The ad-supported model signals that AI interfaces are becoming the new surface for customer acquisition.

openai.com