Visa today revealed it has added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to its Visa Intelligent Commerce, a platform that enables artificial intelligence (AI) agents to conduct transactions.
At the same time, Visa is also piloting a Visa Acceptance Agent Toolkit, which promises to make it simpler for application developers to build AI agents using the MCP Server for the Visa Intelligence Commerce platform.
The overall goal is to make it simpler for application developers to invoke the five application programming interfaces (APIs) that the Visa Intelligent Commerce platform exposes as they build and deploy AI agents, says Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth for Visa.
Originally developed by Anthropic, MCP implemented in a server eliminates the need to hand‑code every API call and manage complex authentication flows, enabling application developers to move from concept to functional prototype in a few hours, he adds.
The Visa Acceptance Agent Toolkit extends that ability by making it possible to add AI agents to e-commerce workflows with having to write additional code. Instead, prebuilt workflows for tasks such as invoice generation and ad hoc analysis of transactions are provided along with a library of natural language prompts and integrations with chat interfaces and business analytics tools.
The MCP server for Visa Intelligent Commerce the MCP Server, in effect, provides a secure framework for communicating with backend Visa services, notes Birwadker. “Application developers can now build applications on top of a set of trusted rails,” says Birwadker.
It’s not clear how complex the interactions involving AI agents might become but initially simple tasks such as creating an invoice or preparing a can be assigned to them to increase productivity, notes Birdwadker.
Longer term, there may even come a day when AI agents negotiate with each other, but, for now, Visa has yet to adopt any protocol for enabling AI agents to interact with each other.
In the meantime, however, it’s clear the cost of building e-commerce applications will rapidly decline as it becomes easier to assign tasks to autonomous AI agents that can be reused as needed.
Ultimately, there is clearly an opportunity for Visa to dramatically expand the scope and reach of its transaction services in the age of agentic AI. For every one human there might soon be hundreds of AI agents that have been granted permission to automatically execute transactions based on any number of parameters ranging from price and availability to shipping location. Theoretically, those transactions will be reviewed by a human before being made but it’s also not too hard to see how AI agents might be programmed to take advantage of specific market conditions whenever a specific set of terms and conditions for making a purchase are met.
Of course, it won’t be too long before the capabilities of those AI agents attract unwanted attention from cybercriminals that will try to commandeer them for their own nefarious ends but at the very least there will be platforms such as Visa Intelligent Commerce to provide the level of AI agent security that soon be required.
