Unleashing May 2025: The FragPunk Code Revolution

The leading payment companies in the world are making significant investments in AI. This week saw Visa and Mastercard launch significant initiatives that will empower AI agents to shop, make choices, and finalize transactions on your behalf, heralding a major advancement in what’s termed agentic commerce.

This goes beyond a mere tech upgrade; it’s a transformative change in how consumers will engage with the online marketplace. Rather than spending time browsing or adding items to your cart, soon AI will manage everything from search to payment, personalized to your preferences.

Visa’s Strategy

Unveiled on Wednesday during the Visa Global Product Drop, Visa’s latest platform allows developers to create AI shopping agents capable of searching, comparing, making decisions, and transacting using Visa’s infrastructure.

“Each consumer sets their parameters, and Visa takes care of the rest,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer.

This offering features:

• AI-enabled credit cards that utilize tokenized digital credentials for enhanced security
• Customized insights (with user consent) to enhance agent performance
• Transaction tools that enable AI to execute purchases within user-defined parameters

Photo by CardMapr.nl on Unsplash

Visa is partnering with an impressive roster of collaborators including OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, IBM, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Stripe, and Samsung, among others.

Mastercard’s Innovation

Only a day before, Mastercard introduced Agent Pay, a feature that allows generative AI agents to make purchases directly during a conversation. Picture having a chat with an AI stylist who understands your body type, preferred style, and upcoming events, and can select and purchase the ideal outfit for you.

“Now she can interact with an AI agent to thoughtfully curate a range of outfits… and complete the purchase,” Mastercard illustrated, describing a