Visa Global Head of Growth Rubail Birwadker explains why brand affinity and customer service remain critical even when autonomous AI agents assist with shopping.
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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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
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”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Assertion Supported
Birwadker: Visa introduced data tokens to improve platform discovery signals
“We've introduced things like data tokens help consumers with better signals that they have associated with their credentials that, you know, platforms can use to provide a better discovery process.”