Visa and Mastercard Put Tokens in Charge of AI Commerce
Visa and Mastercard Put Tokens in Charge of AI Commerce
Publish Date: 2026-06-17 18:59:00
Source Domain: www.pymnts.com
The race to build agentic commerce is producing no shortage of attention around artificial intelligence (AI) assistants. OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and others want consumers to delegate shopping decisions to software.
Yet before any AI agent can complete a purchase, a merchant, issuer and payment network must recognize that agent as authorized to act. That requirement is turning token service providers into one of the most strategically important layers in digital commerce.
Tokenization has long operated behind the scenes. Consumers rarely thought about the replacement of a card number with a secure credential, and merchants arguably viewed tokenization primarily as a fraud-reduction tool.
But due to agentic commerce, the token is becoming more than a substitute for a payment credential. It is becoming a mechanism for establishing identities among parties that may never directly interact with one another.
Recent PYMNTS Intelligence research with Worldpay underscores why that issue matters. While 45% of consumers report being comfortable allowing AI agents to complete purchases on their behalf, 95% express at least one concern related to agentic commerce. The same research found that half of U.S. consumers would place greater trust in agentic commerce if fraud protections were clearly established. Those findings suggest that consumer interest exists, but confidence in the underlying infrastructure remains unsettled.
The Emerging Role of Token Service Providers
The mechanics of a token service provider (TSP) are relatively straightforward. A TSP issues and manages tokenized credentials that replace sensitive payment information. In traditional eCommerce, that process helps reduce fraud and limits exposure of underlying card data.
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Agentic commerce expands the responsibilities attached to that credential.
According to PYMNTS Intelligence’s Prompt Economy research, tokenized credentials can allow consumers to authorize AI agents…
