Visa sees stablecoins powering AI agent micro-commerce

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Visa highlights stablecoins role

Highlights

Visa sees stablecoins as useful for AI micro-payments.
Cards remain better suited for larger consumer purchases.
Agentic commerce may combine both payment systems.

The argument is laid out in Visa and Artemis’s report, “Agentic Payments from the Ground Up,” which examines how AI agents may initiate, authorize, and complete transactions across digital services. The report separates agentic commerce into two categories: larger consumer purchases and high-frequency micro-payments between software systems.

Two payment layers for AI agents

Visa expects traditional cards to remain useful for macro-commerce, where AI agents act on behalf of users in familiar consumer settings. That could include booking flights, renewing subscriptions, comparing prices, or buying goods inside existing merchant networks.

Those transactions still need the protections built around card payments: identity checks, authorization, fraud controls, dispute processes, and consumer liability rules. In other words, when an AI agent acts as a proxy for a person, card rails still fit the structure of the transaction.

Micro-commerce is different. It involves payments that may be worth less than a dollar, such as API calls, data access, software queries, compute resources, or machine-to-machine services. Fixed fees on existing payment rails make many of those transactions uneconomic. The report argues that stablecoins can address that gap because newer blockchains can settle payments at a cost measured in fractions of a cent.

Stablecoins move into machine payments

Visa does not present cards and stablecoins as rivals. The report points instead to a hybrid model, where card networks handle trust and user authorization while stablecoins support low-cost settlement between machines.

That distinction is important. AI agents may need to perform many small tasks inside a broader transaction. A user could approve a travel budget through a card-linked account, while the agent uses stablecoins in the background to pay for data calls, route optimization, or other digital services.

The report also notes that payment infrastructure is already moving in this direction. Card-native protocols are adding stablecoin support, while crypto-native systems are adopting more traditional trust and verification layers.

Trust becomes the main obstacle

The technical case for stablecoins is clearer than the legal one. Most commerce rules assume a human buyer is making the final decision and can be held accountable.

AI agents weaken that assumption. A chain of agents could trigger thousands of payments in a short period, raising questions about consent, mistakes, fraud and reversals. Existing chargeback windows and evidence standards were designed for human-speed transactions, not automated software interactions.

That makes Visa’s report less a prediction of a card-free future than a map of a payments system likely to become more layered. Cards may remain the trust interface. Stablecoins may become the settlement layer for small, fast, and machine-native payments.

We have previously highlighted that Tether launches a Visa card with cashback in XAUt.

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