Agentic commerce, the shift where AI agents shop and pay on your behalf without you lifting a finger, has moved from concept to reality. At the Visa Payments Forum 2026 held in Paris on 2 July, Visa announced that live agentic commerce transactions are now running across Europe, with real AI agents completing real purchases on real merchant websites. For Pakistan’s fast-growing digital payments sector, this moment matters.
What Happened at Visa Payments Forum 2026
Visa gathered over 2,000 payment industry leaders in Paris for its annual Payments Forum. The headline news was big. Visa confirmed that AI agents are now completing purchases with participating merchants, enabled by its infrastructure for trusted and secure transactions. This is not a lab test or a limited sandbox. These are live transactions in live environments with independent merchants.
The AI agents can browse products, compare options, select items and pay, all while staying within limits the user has set in advance. Think of it like giving a trusted assistant a specific shopping budget and a list of rules, then letting them handle the rest while you focus on other things.
Merchants that took part include lastminute.com, Frasers, Cleverbridge and BrickDepot, covering travel, retail and e-commerce. More than 30 European banks, including Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, Revolut and Klarna, completed live agent-executed transactions during the programme.
The Key Agentic Commerce Tools Visa Announced
Alongside the live transactions in Europe, Visa also unveiled a wider set of tools at the forum that will shape how agentic commerce scales globally:
- Agent Score: A tool that checks whether a merchant’s website is ready for AI agents to navigate, search and complete tasks on it.
- Agentic Directory: A verified registry of trusted AI agents and merchants so both sides know who they are dealing with. Fake bots and real trusted agents need to be told apart, and this directory helps do that.
- Large Transaction Model: An AI model trained on billions of transactions to improve fraud detection and cut down on false declines, a problem that has long frustrated both banks and customers.
- OpenAI Partnership: Visa announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to bring secure Visa payments into agentic commerce experiences built on OpenAI’s platform.
- Stablecoin Settlement: Visa is expanding its stablecoin settlement pilots across more regions, blockchains and currencies, pointing to a future where money can move in programmable, always-on ways.
Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, summed up the big picture clearly in his keynote: ‘AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end.’
For authentication, all transactions in the Agentic Ready programme used Visa Payment Passkeys. Every payment is linked to a verified cardholder and their explicit instruction, keeping the user in full control at all times.
What Is Agentic Commerce, in Simple Terms
Agentic commerce is when an AI agent (a software programme that can reason and act) does your shopping for you. You give it a goal in plain language, for example: ‘Buy me a flight to Dubai under Rs80,000, direct only, before 10pm.’ The agent searches, compares, selects and pays. It does not just give you a list. It completes the transaction.
This is different from the chatbots and recommendation engines you already use. Those suggest things. An agentic system acts. It moves money and produces an order at the end of the conversation.
McKinsey estimates this shift could drive up to $1 trillion in B2C retail sales in the US alone by 2030, with global volume potentially hitting between $3 trillion and $5 trillion. The technology is moving faster than most people expected.
To learn more about how Pakistan’s fintech sector is attracting investment around similar shifts, see our piece on Pakistan’s services-to-SaaS shift drawing serious VC attention in 2026.
What This Means for Pakistan’s Digital Wallets
Pakistan’s digital payments sector has grown quickly in recent years. JazzCash and Easypaisa are the two biggest names, handling trillions of rupees annually. Together they hold the largest share of active digital wallet users in the country. Newer players like NayaPay and SadaPay have carved out strong positions among freelancers and young urban users.
According to the State Bank of Pakistan, 84 percent of retail transactions in fiscal year 2023-24 were digital, a sharp jump from 76 percent the year before. Pakistan’s Raast instant payment system has pushed this further by letting people send and receive money at very low cost across all wallets and banks.
NayaPay already has a direct link to Visa. It operates as Pakistan’s first SBP-licensed Electronic Money Institution and has positioned itself as a global-friendly platform backed by Visa’s network. That connection puts it in an interesting position as Visa’s agentic commerce infrastructure scales globally.
Here is the core question for Pakistani fintechs: agentic commerce requires very specific infrastructure. AI agents need APIs (application programming interfaces, which are digital connections between software systems) that let them browse products, check prices and complete payments in a structured, machine-readable way. Most Pakistani wallet apps today are built for human users tapping on a screen, not for AI agents acting autonomously.
Trust is the other big piece. Visa’s system uses Payment Passkeys and a Trusted Agent Protocol so merchants can verify that an AI agent is genuine, not a fraudulent bot. Pakistani platforms will need similar authentication layers before agentic transactions can work here at scale.
The good news is that the technology does not require new infrastructure from scratch. Visa has confirmed that its agentic tools integrate with existing payment systems, working alongside platforms already supported by providers like Cloudflare and Akamai. That means Pakistani fintechs with solid existing systems could adapt more quickly than expected.
The Bigger Picture for Pakistan’s Fintech Future
Pakistan’s State Bank of Pakistan has been actively building the regulatory framework for next-generation digital banking, including its Digital Bank Regulatory Framework that creates new categories of licensed digital banks. Easypaisa has already upgraded to Digital Retail Bank status under this framework.
As Visa pushes agentic commerce into emerging markets after Europe, Pakistan’s fintechs will need to think about API readiness, agent authentication, and how to protect users when an AI makes a payment on their behalf. Regulatory clarity from the SBP on AI-initiated transactions will also be important.
The shift is not overnight. Visa itself describes the current moment as ‘early days’ in the European context. But the direction is clear. Agentic commerce is coming, and the fintechs that build the right infrastructure now will be best placed when it arrives in Pakistan.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is agentic commerce and how does it work?
Agentic commerce is when an AI agent completes a purchase on your behalf, from searching and comparing to paying, based on instructions and limits you set in advance. Unlike a chatbot that suggests things, an agentic system actually moves money and places an order without you doing each step manually.
What did Visa announce at its Payments Forum 2026?
At the Visa Payments Forum 2026 in Paris, Visa announced that live agentic commerce transactions have been completed across Europe with more than 30 banks and several independent merchants. It also revealed new tools including Agent Score, an Agentic Directory, a Large Transaction Model for fraud detection, a partnership with OpenAI, and expanded stablecoin settlement pilots.
Does agentic commerce affect Pakistani consumers right now?
Not directly yet. Visa’s live agentic commerce is currently running in Europe. But the technology and standards being built today will shape how global payment networks, including those used by Pakistani wallets like JazzCash, Easypaisa and NayaPay, evolve over the next few years. Pakistani fintechs will need to update their APIs and security layers to be ready.
What do Pakistani fintechs need to do to be ready for agentic commerce?
They need to build machine-readable APIs so AI agents can interact with their systems, set up agent authentication protocols to tell verified agents apart from fraudulent bots, and create clear permission systems that keep users in control of what an AI agent can spend on their behalf. Regulatory guidance from the State Bank of Pakistan will also play a key role.
