In the very near future, it won't just be CEOs who have secretaries to handle day-to-day bureaucratic tasks, such as buying airline tickets, flowers for their wives, or ordering a suit for a special event. By next year, it's possible that any consumer will have their own personal shopping assistant, thanks to artificial intelligence.
Visa conducted its first transaction using artificial intelligence agents in Brazil on Wednesday, March 11th. The test was carried out in partnership with Banco do Brasil, using the Visa Intelligent Commerce (VIC) platform. The expectation is that the technology will be released for widespread use in the second half of the year.
The so-called "agent commerce," which occurs when agents driven by AI rather than people conduct the purchasing process, is what lies behind the test carried out by Visa and Banco do Brasil.
In practice, the system allowed an artificial intelligence agent to execute the payment using a previously enabled BB Visa card, with authentication, tokenization, and security controls supported by Visa's global infrastructure.
The innovation proposes a change in the logic of e-commerce. Instead of the consumer navigating through websites and apps, they delegate part of the buying journey to an AI agent — whether large LLMs like ChatGPT, or even store bots — that can search for products, compare offers, and complete the transaction within parameters defined by the user.
“You can say: look for a flight from Rio de Janeiro and, if you find one for less than R$ 300, you can buy it. The agent monitors and executes when it finds the condition. It's like having a digital assistant that does the research and executes the purchase,” says Leandro Garcia, executive director of products at Visa Brazil, to NeoFeed .
Besides Banco do Brasil, other Brazilian issuers are also participating in the technology tests. If it gains scale, the impact could go beyond the consumer experience. For Garcia, agent commerce could also change the dynamics of competition in digital retail.
According to him, small retailers, who currently struggle to appear in the top search results, can gain more visibility when recommendations are made by algorithms. "Instead of competing for the first page of search results, companies will be competing for the preference of AI agents," says Garcia.
Visa launched Visa Intelligent Commerce globally last year and has already completed the first transactions of this type in the United States and Europe. Since the end of 2025, the company had been working to bring the technology to the Brazilian market earlier.
One of the challenges was adapting the solution to the specific characteristics of the local payment system, which combines different methods — such as credit and debit — and requires additional controls.
"It's a challenging country. We need to take a closer look to ensure that all security and control mechanisms are working," says Garcia.
In addition to payment infrastructure, the company also developed a protocol called Trust Agent Protocol, launched globally in November, which allows identifying when a transaction is being initiated by an AI agent certified by Visa. The idea is to provide more transparency to merchants and reduce the risk of fraud.
Another focus of the current testing phase is understanding the behavior of both users and the AI agents themselves. The concern is to ensure that the system operates within security standards and to avoid misinterpretations or inappropriate decisions by the algorithms.
