Visa APIs verify natural language intent before authorizing AI agent transactions
Rubail Birwadker · How Generative AI Could Change Shopping Forever — With Rubail Birwadker · Nov 20, 2025 · at 20:22
Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth at Visa, explains safety and fraud prevention features built into Visa's Intelligent Commerce APIs for autonomous AI agents.
0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 22.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We've introduced incremental data payloads on things what we call in our APIs called payment instructions and signals, where we actually try to match the consumer natural language intent to the thing the agent is going to buy before we actually release the credential to be able, what we call like a cryptogram. Before the credential can actually even be used for a visa, for like a visa transaction.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Rubail Birwadker
Birwadker: Brand loyalty will persist despite the convenience of AI shopping agents
“And those things don't really go away just because there is a better convenience of sort of like getting to the end answer.”
Birwadker: Agentic bot traffic to merchants quadrupled after initial 1,200% surge
“Like four or five months ago, we had seen an increase of roughly about 1200% in, in agentic traffic to merchant websites. That number in itself has forexed in the last five months.”
Birwadker: Agentic AI will become a complementary commerce channel, not replace existing ones
“And we think with the Gentic, you're just going to see another channel that's going to be very helpful in certain types of commerce, in certain segments of commerce which doesn't mean that, you know, the existing channels are going to go away. I just think the…”
Birwadker: Agentic commerce begins with broad discovery, not direct checkout commands
“The question, at least in my experience and everything that we hear from, you know, clients and merchants is typically less to do with go book me a plane ticket. It almost always starts with a much, much broader funnel of discovery”
Birwadker: Relevant agentic transaction data will emerge in about six months
“I I'd say in about six months or so, we'll start to see like some early statistically relevant enough data sets. Where we can start to like draw conclusions. That's like my best guess, but you know, it all remains to be seen how quickly some of these things ge…”
Birwadker: Agent commerce will see significant protocol fragmentation in near term
“We think ultimately the world is going to, you know, it's going to be, you know, we're going to see a lot of like fragmentation in the near term. We're going to see a lot of interesting protocols and a lot of different ways and experiences where this is going …”