SAN FRANCISCO — Consumers are increasingly comfortable using artificial intelligence to help them shop, but most remain reluctant to let AI actually make payments on their behalf, according to new research released by Visa.
Visa said its new Trust Index for agentic commerce found just 23% of U.S. consumers trust generative AI to handle payment transactions for them, even though 72% said they have used an AI assistant.
The findings highlight what Visa said could be one of the biggest obstacles to the emergence of “agentic commerce,” in which AI agents can move beyond recommending products or comparing prices and take actions on behalf of consumers, including completing purchases.
The research also found consumers’ willingness to allow AI to handle transactions can change significantly depending on the company involved.
Visa said 61% of respondents indicated they would trust Visa to handle AI-powered agentic transactions, making it the most trusted brand for that purpose among the payments, technology and social media companies included in its research.
That figure increased to 68% among consumers ages 18 to 34 and 71% among frequent AI users, according to Visa.
Trust Emerging as Key Issue
Visa said the results suggest consumers distinguish between the AI platforms they are willing to use for shopping and the payment companies they trust to complete a transaction.
“AI has the potential to fundamentally reshape how people discover, buy and pay for goods and services, much like e-commerce and mobile commerce did before it,” Oliver Jenkyn, group president at Visa, said in announcing the findings.
“While we’re still in the early days, trust will be foundational to driving agentic commerce adoption,” Jenkyn added. “Consumers will increasingly look to trusted payment experiences and brands as they deploy AI agents to shop on their behalf.”
The survey comes as payments companies, financial institutions and technology providers increasingly prepare for a world in which AI agents could initiate and complete transactions with limited direct involvement by consumers.
For financial institutions, that shift could raise new questions surrounding authentication, authorization, fraud prevention and how institutions determine whether an AI agent has legitimate permission to act for an account holder.
Visa Building Agentic Payments Infrastructure
Visa said it is working with other companies to develop the technology, standards and infrastructure needed to support secure, permissioned transactions initiated by AI agents.
Its efforts include Visa Intelligent Commerce, an initiative designed to connect AI platforms with Visa’s payments network while providing tools for authentication, identity verification, transaction security and consumer controls.
The company has positioned those capabilities as a way of carrying existing payment protections into agentic commerce.
“Throughout every major shift in commerce, from the growth of e-commerce to the rise of mobile payments, trust provides stability and certainty to consumers as the world changes around them,” Jenkyn said.
Survey Included More Than 2,000 Consumers
The Visa Trust Index was based on an online Harris Poll survey conducted May 26-28 among 2,065 U.S. consumers.
Visa said respondents were matched to the U.S. general adult population based on U.S. Census data.
For questions measuring trust in individual brands to handle payment transactions, sample sizes ranged from 1,028 to 1,034 respondents per brand tested.
The findings suggest widespread use of AI assistants has yet to translate into similar confidence in autonomous payments — leaving trust, security and consumer control as potentially significant factors in determining how quickly agentic commerce gains acceptance.
