Visa Intelligent Commerce Explained: How AI Agents Will Actually Pay

Order of operations

Simon Jones's central argument is about sequencing. "You cannot ship agentic checkout before agent identity, and you cannot ship identity before delegation," he says. Getting the order wrong, in his view, produces demos and not infrastructure.

On the merchant side, Simon Jones says Sumvin looks up about a million websites every day, indexes them and confirms who they are. He also says the company has extended an existing payments protocol so it can index merchant agents, which he does not think anybody else does commercially.

Delegating a purchase

Simon Jones describes an errand tool that lets a user set conditions for an agent: book a Friday afternoon flight to Chicago if it can be found for no more than $700 within the next six hours. He links the idea to what he sees as app overload: "I had over a 100 apps on my phone. Right? I probably used five of them."

Winning over an airline

Jones recounts a major airline whose terms and conditions banned anyone from using an AI agent to buy a ticket. The airline's position changed once he explained that, with the customer's permission, he could share customer information with it. According to Jones, the response was: "I'll let you use an AI agent to book a flight."

Stablecoins as internet money

Sumvin settles across two rails: card networks for traditional clearing and stablecoins onchain for always-on settlement. Simon Jones says stablecoins have become good dollars and are the most logical money supply for the internet. He expects that by January next year USDC, Tether USDt and other chartered stablecoins will be accepted as good dollars, and argues that settlement should be compressed into one function, which is where machine to machine infrastructure becomes interesting.