Visa Sees Agentic Commerce Expanding TAM Beyond Tokenization in Q3 2026

Visa’s view of Agentic Commerce beyond tokenization (expanded TAM, agent-to-agent contracts, and critical capabilities)

1) Beyond tokenization: Visa frames Agentic Commerce as a full “trust + ecosystem” problem

Visa’s management explicitly distinguishes Agentic Commerce as more than “capturing and tokenizing those volumes.” The emphasis is on building products and services that enable secure use of Visa credentials in agentic transactions and that increase trust so the ecosystem will adopt the new commerce model. ¹

Visa says its investments across recent quarters are “directly intended to address that trust” and ensure “users have trust in using Visa credentials to make commerce” and “agentic commerce transactions.” ² In other words, Visa’s perspective is that the value opportunity depends on being a trusted rail/credentialing and security layer for agent-mediated payments—not just a mechanism to represent value on-chain or via tokenization. ²

Visa also describes Agentic Commerce as inevitable: “Agentic commerce is a when not an if,” with Visa building the “products, the services, the protocols” and ensuring “the ecosystem has what it takes.” ² This is important for how Visa views TAM: it implies a multi-step adoption curve where trust-building capabilities unlock broader commerce usage over time (not an immediate, single-use-case market). ²³

2) Expanding the addressable market: AI-driven payment adoption creates incremental phases

Visa’s TAM argument is structured around an adoption curve they believe payments will follow, analogous to prior cycles such as ecommerce, mobile commerce, and tokenization/tap-to-pay. ³ Management states that AI and Agentic Commerce will expand Visa’s addressable market, and that Visa is in the “very early stages” of a “major adoption curve.” ³

Visa describes the adoption progression in phases:

1. Current phase: consumers already using AI to shop. ³
2. Next phase: enabling agents to transact on their behalf, “with or without them” (including “in the loop”). ³

Visa argues the key accelerant for adoption is trust—specifically:

• trust the payment is secure,
• trust the agent is authorized,
• trust the transaction reflects the consumer’s actual intent, and
• protections exist if something goes wrong. ³

So when Visa talks about expanding the addressable market, it’s not only that “more payments happen,” but that the market expands because agents can transact autonomously once these trust and authorization/intent/protection requirements are credibly met. ³

3) Agent-to-agent contracts: Visa points to new “economic contracts” made possible by agents

The user question asks about agent-to-agent contracts and Visa’s role in enabling them. Visa addresses this conceptually by connecting the next adoption phase to agents transacting on consumers’ behalf and emphasizing the trust requirements that would be necessary for those relationships to scale. ³

In the Q&A prompt itself, Visa is asked directly about “expand[ing] your addressable market into new economic contracts like agent-to-agent.” ¹ Visa’s response does not quantify agent-to-agent contract volumes in the provided excerpts, but it does align with the underlying premise that the agentic phase (after consumer AI shopping) is what unlocks materially broader commerce transactions. ³ Since Visa’s “ultimate” accelerant is trust that the agent is authorized and that intent/protections exist, it implies Visa views agent-to-agent style arrangements as part of the broader autonomous-agent commerce landscape that must be supported by authorization and security controls. ³

4) What capabilities Visa says are most critical (from the excerpts)

Visa repeatedly ties Agentic Commerce success to concrete capability areas. The most critical are:

A) Trust, security, and authorization for agent-initiated transactions

Visa states it is investing in products/protocols that ensure trust in using Visa credentials for agentic commerce transactions. ² Management further specifies trust dimensions as the accelerant for adoption: secure payments, authorized agents, correct reflection of consumer intent, and protections when things go wrong. ³

B) Infrastructure that makes agent transactions “transparent and trusted”

Visa says it enabled seller capabilities including an “agent score” and “agent directory,” and it built infrastructure including a “token assurance framework” to ensure agent-initiated transactions are “transparent and trusted.” ⁴ These are directly relevant to the “authorized agent” and “intent/protection” themes described as adoption accelerants. ³⁴

C) Credentialing/security infrastructure for agentic commerce experiences

As part of its OpenAI partnership, Visa says it will provide its “global network, credentialing capabilities, and security infrastructure” to support agentic commerce experiences so “consumers and businesses [can] interact and transact with confidence.” ⁴ This links Visa’s role to the operational requirements of large-scale agent-mediated payments (credentialing + security). ⁴

D) Orchestration and scalable delivery of the agentic stack (how Visa builds)

Visa also emphasizes the internal capability to deliver and iterate quickly—describing a shift toward “agentic squads” and improved engineering velocity with “agentic tool chain,” including 80% more code commits and 65%-plus faster feature development. ⁵ While this is not an end-user “capability,” it supports Visa’s claim that it can develop the needed protocols/services to reach broad adoption. ⁵

5) How this connects to Visa’s broader commercialization motion (signals from performance and related infrastructure)

While the excerpts don’t provide an explicit revenue breakdown for Agentic Commerce or agent-to-agent contracts, they provide context for why Visa believes it can monetize the ecosystem layer:

• Visa emphasizes that its “Visa-as-a-Service stack” and focus on clients underpins its ability to drive trust and growth. ⁶
• It notes “tokenized penetration nearing 60% of our e-commerce transactions globally.” ⁶ This supports the argument that tokenization adoption already exists as a foundation for the next agentic phase (agent authorization and trust layers), even though the question is specifically “beyond tokenization.” ⁶

Separately, Visa discusses stablecoin investments as enabling “global money movement” and as reshaping the back end of commerce, while viewing “AI as transforming the front end” and stating agentic commerce will “expand our addressable market and drive future growth.” ⁷ This reinforces that Visa sees Agentic Commerce expansion as a combined front-end (AI/agents) and transaction/settlement ecosystem play, not solely a tokenization play. ⁷

Bottom line

Visa views Agentic Commerce as expanding its addressable market by moving payments into an early adoption curve where agents can transact on behalf of consumers “with or without them,” with adoption accelerated primarily by trust: secure payments, agent authorization, alignment with consumer intent, and protections if problems occur. ³ Visa’s role is not limited to tokenizing volumes; it’s to build and operate the credentialing, security, transparency, and authorization-related infrastructure—including products like agent score/directory and a token assurance framework—and to provide ecosystem capabilities through partners (e.g., OpenAI) that make agentic commerce experiences safe and credible. ²³⁴

Regarding agent-to-agent contracts, the excerpts do not quantify those contract types, but Visa’s trust/authorization framework and the described “agentic” phase support the view that new “economic contracts” between agents become feasible at scale only when authorization and intent/protection requirements are satisfied by the payment ecosystem layer that Visa helps provide. ¹³