Intelligent Commerce

Intelligent Commerce is a system built by the payments network Visa that allows an AI program, rather than a person, to shop and pay on someone's behalf. Instead of handing over a real card when buying something, it's like giving a trusted agent a temporary number that's freshly generated for that specific purchase. This temporary number is linked to the original card number but isn't the card number itself, so even if something goes wrong while the agent is using it, the real card information stays safe.

This kind of service emerged from the growing trend of chatbots booking flights and choosing and ordering products on people's behalf. For AI to handle payments without a person pulling out a card each time, card companies needed to build a separate payment channel that AI could use safely. Around the same time, Mastercard rolled out a similar service called Agent Pay.

An article about the crypto company MoonPay adding a payment wallet to Grok notes that "it's not just crypto companies jumping in," and mentions Visa's Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard's Agent Pay together. A common misunderstanding is that this service isn't about coins or crypto wallets — it's an expansion of the existing card payment network to let AI use it.