Artificial intelligence agents are about to take away Visa's market share

Article Author: Thejaswini M A

Article Compilation: Block unicorn

Introduction

Visa's entire business model is a bet on human behavior. It concerns human consumption and psychology. The reward points you accumulate, the fraud protection you rely on, the coveted Centurion card, and the zero liability policy that makes you feel secure when using ATMs abroad all exist not because of the difficulty of transferring funds, but because of human anxiety, the pursuit of status, and the inability to read terms and conditions. Visa has leveraged this cognitive disparity to build a company worth $500 billion.

However, AI agents do not possess these traits.

They do not accumulate points, do not seek fraud protection, and do not desire a black card. They have only one instruction: complete the task. And when the task involves payment, the agent performs complex calculations that humans would never bother to make: the cheapest path, the fastest settlement, the lowest fees. Every time, it is done automatically, devoid of any emotion.

Last month, an article titled "The Global Intelligence Crisis of 2028" on SubStack caused Visa's stock to plummet 4% in a single trading day, Mastercard dropped 6%, and American Express fell 12%. The report was labeled as a "scenario analysis," rather than a "forecast" (as originally stated). But the market did not buy it. The technical assertions were irrelevant. The issue is that by 2027, agents will bypass transaction centers and use stablecoins for settlement. Visa spent fifty years perfecting its products, and now, its customer base is being replaced.

In machine-to-machine commerce, a 2-3% interchange fee is clearly a target. This assertion from Citrini Research is its core argument. This does not mean that AI will destroy Visa tomorrow. Rather, the fee structure that Visa relies on to build its business empire is essentially a tax on human irrational behavior, while the traders themselves are completely rational. This is the essence of Visa's existence.

What is Visa Selling?

To understand why this is important, you must know what interchange fees are actually used for.

When you shop with a credit card, merchants pay a fee of 2-3% to the credit card network and your issuing bank. This fee is used to pay for your reward points, fraud protection, shopping insurance, and dispute resolution services. The entire consumer value proposition of credit cards is borne by merchants, who ultimately pass the cost on to consumers by slightly raising the prices of goods. This is a well-established and stable system that has been running for fifty years, as consumers in transactions are willing to bear all these costs, albeit indirectly.

AI agents do not need these. They do not dispute fees or request refunds. The rationale for charging this fee is that it can prevent human errors, fraud, and impulsive behavior. If there is no human involvement in the transaction, this fee becomes completely meaningless.

American Express is the most typical embodiment of this issue. Its customers are high-income, high-spending, and aspirational premium cardholders. Its annual fee is higher than Visa or Mastercard precisely because its customers are willing to pay for status and privileges. The premise of this model is that purchasing behavior is driven by humans; customers choose American Express over Visa because the access to VIP lounges is worth it. However, agents do not actively choose American Express; they only seek the cheapest option to complete a transaction. In a world where software controls credit cards, high-end membership tiers do not exist.

The agent-led, interchange fee-bypassing business routing model poses a greater risk to credit card banks and single-issue issuers that heavily rely on 2-3% fee income and build entire business segments around merchant-subsidized reward programs. Visa and Mastercard have adaptable network businesses. In contrast, issuers that build their entire profit and loss models around interchange fees and reward programs have nowhere to retreat.

The Week Everyone Ships at the Same Time

The Citrini report and the launch of infrastructure projects were released within the same three-week period.

Tempo officially launched its mainnet last Wednesday. The payment blockchain co-developed by Stripe and Paradigm is designed for high-volume stablecoin settlements and was launched simultaneously with the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP). MPP is an open standard that allows AI agents to autonomously pay service fees without manual approval for each transaction. The protocol introduces a session mechanism. Agents only need to authorize a spending limit once to continuously make micropayments for services such as data consumption, computation, or API calls. Fund payments use OAuth authentication. Users authorize budgets, and agents can spend. The entire process does not require using a credit card at every step.

Anthropic, DoorDash, Mastercard, Nubank, OpenAI, Ramp, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, and Visa are all listed as design partners for Tempo. The entire payment and e-commerce ecosystem recognizes this structural change.

On the same day Tempo launched, Visa's cryptocurrency division released a command-line interface tool for AI agents to make payments through terminals without API keys, accounts, or manual authorization. Visa calls it "command-line commerce"—machines can transact without human intervention.

Mastercard agreed to acquire stablecoin infrastructure startup BVNK for $1.8 billion. Circle launched Nanopayments on the testnet, a USDC transaction designed for agents that can be used without accounts or credentials, costing less than a cent and with no gas fees. Sam Altman's World project launched AgentKit, allowing agents to carry crypto proofs to verify they represent real people; this toolkit is directly integrated into Coinbase's payment system, enabling the platform to verify agent identities without hindering legitimate transactions.

In my view, what happened last week was that companies were racing to become the new Visa to prevent Visa from realizing what it has already lost.

The Obvious Paradox

Now, there is no point that is not clear enough, which is that Visa is not stagnant.

It is involved in the development of the Machine Payment Protocol (MAPPS) for Tempo and has launched Visa Crypto Labs, where its cryptocurrency head wrote in Fortune magazine explaining how agents can use credit cards for payments through new standards. Mastercard is investing $1.8 billion in stablecoin infrastructure. Stripe has acquired Bridge and Privy. Existing companies are aware of this shift and are preparing before the new infrastructure fully arrives.

Visa's argument is that it can expand its trajectory into agent-driven commerce before establishing a track that makes Visa irrelevant.

This statement is not entirely wrong. Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in total payments in 2025, a 34% year-over-year increase. These companies are not shrinking. The network distribution advantages of card organizations are hard to replicate. I admit I am somewhat reluctant to say this publicly because, based on historical experience, once someone makes this argument, new products are released that make them look foolish.

So, the flaw in this argument lies here: Visa's distribution advantage is built on relationships with merchants and consumer trust. Merchants accept Visa because consumers hold Visa; consumers hold Visa because merchants accept Visa. The entire cycle relies on humans. Once agents become the primary buyers in a significant business area, this flywheel will slow down. Agents have neither brand loyalty nor wallets. All they have are budgets and instructions. The cheapest and fastest route will win their business, and the switching costs are zero.

I want to accurately state where we are because the current public opinion is developing faster than the data itself.

Although the ecosystem surrounding x402 is valued at about $7 billion, on-chain data shows that the daily transaction volume on the protocol was only about $28,000 last week, most of which came from testing rather than actual transactions. This figure is worlds apart from Visa's daily transaction volume.

The transaction volume of x402 has surpassed 50 million. Although the transaction amounts are small, the number of transactions indicates that the infrastructure is being used. Developers are building on this. Merchant-side services accepting agent payments are also growing. This is how payment networks start.

McKinsey estimates that by 2030, AI agents could facilitate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global consumer transactions. This estimate may be correct or overly optimistic. But there is no doubt that the agent-driven business model has not yet been widely adopted. Merchants building native agent services, businesses treating agents as primary buyers, and transaction volumes that can truly test economic viability are still in development.

The reason the Citrini report caused market panic is that it simulated a series of credible events. Mastercard's Q1 2027 financial report will not attribute the slowdown in transaction volume to "agent-driven price optimization." At least not for now.

The first to be affected is the micropayments for AI infrastructure, not consumer commerce.

Agents completing research tasks call specialized data APIs hundreds of times per session. Each call costs only a fraction of a cent. Over a week, these calls might generate $40 in revenue for the developers operating the service. Credit card networks cannot cope with this. The economic model of minimum transaction amounts does not work. The merchant onboarding process does not work. The fee structure does not work. Such business models cannot operate within Visa's framework. They require an entirely new model, and x402, Nanopayments, and Tempo are building this model.

As the model constructed by Citrini shows, the disruption of consumer commerce, even if it occurs, will come later. It requires agents to handle a significant portion of discretionary spending, which in turn requires consumers to trust agents to make purchasing decisions that they currently make themselves.

Visa is being impacted by higher-quality customers. These customers no longer need the elements that Visa relies on for success. The 2-3% interchange fee is not a transaction tax but a tax on human irrational behavior. And agents are completely rational.

How do I know this is important? Because Visa spent $1.8 billion last week to ensure it is not excluded from the answer.