Visa Launches Trusted Agent, an Agentic Commerce Protocol

Visa Inc. entered the agentic-commerce fray early Tuesday with the launch of Trusted Agent, a protocol developed in collaboration with cloud-computing connectivity provider Cloudflare Inc. The protocol is part of an overall strategy to make agent-initiated transactions as seamless and secure “as any consumer-initiated transaction today,” the card network tells Digital Transactions News by email.

Like other recent agentic-commerce protocols, such as one from PayPal Holdings Inc. and Google Inc., Visa’s protocol was developed to help merchants distinguish between trusted AI agents and bots/fraudsters with malicious intent. This allows merchants to avoid blocking legitimate transactions, Visa says. To authenticate AI agents shopping on behalf of consumers, the Trusted Agent Protocol uses agent-specific cryptographic signatures and enables agents to provide merchants additional information.

“[The] Trusted Agent Protocol was designed to allow merchants to receive additional context in agentic commerce with minimal changes to existing user experiences or overhauling backend systems,” a Visa spokesperson says by email.

Agentic commerce is a fast-growing trend. During the past year, AI-driven traffic to retail Web sites in the United States surged more than 4,700%, and 85% of shoppers who have used AI for online shopping say it improved their shopping experience, according to Adobe Data Insights.

Visa developed the Trusted Agent protocol to be an interoperable part of the agentic commerce ecosystem. In addition to working with Cloudflare to develop the protocol, Visa says it is also working with global standards bodies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force, OpenID Foundation, and EMVCo, to ensure its protocol complements others. Visa is also collaborating with digital currency exchange Coinbase to make the protocol interoperable with the x402 protocol, an open protocol that standardizes Internet-native payments. 

“We are engaged with Google, OpenAI, and Stripe, and are looking to create compatibility across the ecosystem. These platforms have the same goal in mind that we do – building trust in agent-initiated payments,” says the Visa spokesperson. 

Processors supporting the new protocol include Nuvei Corp..  

Visa says it is also working closely with leading bot-management solutions providers to help facilitate the recognition of trusted agents onboarded through Visa Intelligent Commerce, a Visa initiative to enable AI agents to conduct online shopping on behalf of consumers, the Visa spokesperson adds.

Meanwhile, Cloudflare is working with several payments companies to create an authentication layer for agentic commerce leveraging the Web Bot Auth protocol, which uses a cryptographic signature to prove the authenticity of Web bots and AI agents. Payments companies Cloudflare is working with include Mastercard Inc. and American Express Co.

Mastercard is incorporating Web Bot Auth into Mastercard Agent Pay, the card company’s agentic commerce protocol launched earlier this year.. American Express will also leverage Web Bot Auth for its agentic-commerce program. AI agents built with the Cloudflare Agents software development kit will be able to use those protocols to shop autonomously at millions of merchants globally, Cloudflare says.

“When developing the Trusted Agent Protocol, Visa needed a secure way to authenticate each agent and securely transmit important information from the agent to the merchant’s Web site,” Will Allen, vice president of product for Cloudflare, says by email. “That’s where we came in and worked with the team at Visa to build upon the foundation of Web Bot Auth. Web Bot Auth proposals specify how developers of bots and agents can attach their cryptographic signatures in HTTP requests by utilizing HTTP Message Signatures.”

Payments-technology companies are racing to get in on the ground floor of agentic commerce by developing protocols, but how agentic commerce will evolve is unknown.

“As with the launch of the Internet, there are currently no standards to enable interoperability or to lessen the time and economic cost of implementing an agentic solution,” Thad Peterson, a strategic advisor for Datos Insights, says by email. “Agentic standards will change that and the efforts on the part of Visa to lead in developing an agentic-commerce protocol is a significant early step in the agentic journey.”

Peterson adds that, ultimately, two to three agentic-commerce standards will be adopted globally, “but time will tell,” he adds.