{"id":31875,"date":"2026-05-08T04:31:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T04:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/31875\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T04:31:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T04:31:12","slug":"visa-cards-for-ai-agents-visa-and-inflow-enable-agentic-payments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/31875\/","title":{"rendered":"Visa Cards For AI Agents: Visa And Inflow Enable Agentic Payments"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AI<\/p>\n

AI agents can now pay for services, thanks to new technology from Visa and InFlow.<\/p>\n

NurPhoto via Getty Images<\/p>\n

AI agents are doing more and more work every day. One helps me research the humanoid robot ecosystem; another manages my daily email and weekly calendar. Until now, however, agents had a hard time paying for services, even if I wanted to authorize them to do so. This week, that changed. San Francisco-based InFlow is launching what it calls agent-native commerce infrastructure, built on top of Visa Intelligent Commerce. The combination is meaningful because it pairs two things the agentic economy has been missing in the same place: secure, network-grade payment credentials that an agent can actually use, and a policy engine that decides what an agent is allowed to do with them.<\/p>\n

In other words: the AI agent gets a wallet, and the wallet comes with rules.<\/p>\n

InFlow launched late last year<\/a> to enable agentic payments. At the time, founder and former PayPal executive Jim Nguyen told me that \u201cAI agents are getting smarter every day, but they still can\u2019t activate or pay for services on their own.\u201d <\/p>\n

The problem: not a lack of intelligence, but “the lack of an AI-native payment system designed to remove friction from agentic commerce.\u201d His goal was to launch PayPal, essentially, for agents.<\/p>\n

Now it appears he\u2019s actually done that.<\/p>\n

InFlow positions itself as B2AI infrastructure: business-to-AI. In other words, the customer it\u2019s built for isn\u2019t a human but an agent. The platform handles identity, onboarding, multi-currency wallet functionality and what InFlow calls a policy-governed payments engine. Visa Intelligent Commerce supplies the payment credentials, tokenization, authentication and merchant acceptance through Visa’s global network.<\/p>\n

“AI agents are a new buyer category, and businesses need a trusted way to support them,” Visa VP Tanner Riche said in a statement. “Visa Intelligent Commerce helps enable secure, trusted credentials for agent-initiated transactions. Together with InFlow, we’re helping build infrastructure that connects developers, buyers and sellers into the B2AI economy.”<\/p>\n

This might sound so cutting edge that is risks being bleeding edge, but this is a large emerging market. According to Visa\u2019s own Business-to-AI repor<\/a>t, 71% of businesses say they’re willing to optimize products, offers, and experiences specifically for AI agents and 77% are already using or piloting AI in their operations. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s a lot of companies preparing to sell to a customer that, until very recently, couldn\u2019t pay for anything. Never mind not existing, period.<\/p>\n

Of course, the deeper question this launch surfaces isn\u2019t whether agents can transact \u2026 it\u2019s how they\u2019re supposed to make decisions about transacting. And whether we trust our AI agents to spend our money.<\/p>\n

Today, says Nguyen, the human is the policy.<\/p>\n

When we chatted late last week, he walked me through what he sees as a structural gap in existing payment infrastructure. Today\u2019s payment systems, he argued, are essentially fused together with us: the decision layer (what to buy, how much to spend, under what conditions) and the entry layer (typing card numbers and clicking submit) collapse into a single human action. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s pretty obvious, right: we decide what to buy, how much to spend, where to spend. But because the human is the policy, if you pull the human out of the loop, the policy goes with them.<\/p>\n

And that becomes the missing layer in agentic commerce.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the answer InFlow gives to the inevitable investor question \u2014 why can\u2019t Stripe do this \u2014 and it’s the part of the agentic commerce story that most existing wallets and processors haven’t fully addressed. A wallet that can be drained by anything holding the right credentials is a different product from a wallet that knows what it’s allowed to spend on, with whom and under what limits.<\/p>\n

(If you\u2019re not sure about that, remember that X\u2019s Grok just lost $200,000 in crypto<\/a> when a user sent it some Morse code.)<\/p>\n

So policies and protections are essential for agentic commerce. And of course Stripe and other major payment players are probably not standing still on this. There\u2019s no reason they couldn\u2019t build a policy layer on top of existing infrastructure. But the gap Nguyen is pointing at \u2014 that policy and payment have always been separate concerns held together by a human, and that decoupling requires more than a UI change \u2014 is real, and it\u2019s the kind of structural problem that can block innovation if not handled correctly.<\/p>\n

Right now this is pretty B2B focused. It\u2019s not you or me asking an agent to buy a pair of Air Jordan\u2019s in size 10 if they come available at $200.<\/p>\n

InFlow and Visa are aiming at B2B cloud infrastructure: the compute, inference, data, storage and capability layers that agents themselves consume to do their work. My agents have spent upwards of $2,000 in tokens over the last three months, but I\u2019ve had to personally authorize all of those payments. The shoes-and-airline-tickets version of consumer agentic commerce is a longer arc (but it\u2019s coming, too).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s telling that Visa is the partner here, and not just some crypto company or stablecoin platform.<\/p>\n

Visa Intelligent Commerce isn\u2019t just a co-marketing badge. It\u2019s an additional trust layer. Tokenization, authentication, and merchant acceptance across Visa\u2019s network mean that an agent transacting through InFlow isn\u2019t operating in a crypto fantasy: it’s transacting with credentials that any merchant on Visa’s global network can recognize and accept.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s important.<\/p>\n

The big question, however, is whether the big digital payment players will adopt similar technology quickly enough to compete.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI agents can now pay for services, thanks to new technology from Visa and InFlow. NurPhoto via Getty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[673,4077,24,405,20474,7537,912],"class_list":{"0":"post-31875","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-agentic-commerce","9":"tag-agents","10":"tag-ai","11":"tag-ai-agents","12":"tag-ai-commerce","13":"tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","14":"tag-commerce"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}