The practice of waking up in the middle of the night to buy the cheapest airline ticket is over. Soon, an artificial intelligence agent will search for the best prices, find the most favorable conditions and complete the transaction autonomously, even if the customer is dreaming of a paradisiacal beach while sleeping.
The process is one of the multiple possible use cases of the so-called “agentic commerce”, one of the payments industry’s biggest bets to leverage the use of AI in e-commerce.
By 2030, autonomous purchasing agents are expected to be worth US$5 trillion globally, according to projections from McKinsey & Company.
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The expectation is that an important part of this volume will come from Brazil, considered strategic for the adoption of new developments in the financial sector, which has developed due to the success of Pix and fintechs. Therefore, the three card brands that lead the local market are in different stages of testing the agentic tool.
In March, Visa concluded the first operations entirely carried out by AI agents in the country with cards issued by Banco do Brasil and Santander. In the case of BB, the procedure was carried out entirely by Brazilian networks.
After prior authorization, the cardholder’s card is enabled to process the transaction, which allows the autonomous assistant to make the payment on behalf of the customer. Visa is responsible for authentication and security controls, in addition to tokenization – the replacement of sensitive card data with a unique code to protect information.
Artificial intelligence
Completing the first transaction was important to prove the technical viability of the agentic model, assesses the vice president of Products and Innovation at Visa do Brasil, in an interview with BroadcastGrupo Estado’s real-time news system).
The milestone also attracted the interest of other issuers (banks and fintechs, for example) to accelerate adoption of the technology. “Several businesses approached us to understand the opportunities,” he said, without specifying the companies.
The process also officially opened the race between flags to offer the best solutions. Just over 10 days after Visa’s announcement, rival Mastercard also conducted agent payments in Brazil, with cards from Itaú Unibanco and Santander. The “robots” performed live purchases with credit and debit cards for products ranging from makeup to supermarket items.
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For Mastercard Brasil’s senior vice president of customer solutions, Eduardo Arnoni, the project responds to a growing demand from consumers for shopping experiences that are agile and convenient. “Our role as a flagship is to transmit in this universe the same safety, simplicity and security that we would already offer from the world of payments in physical establishments” he explains.
At the Brazilian Elo, the objective is to ensure that the agent system minimizes the fragmentation of the online shopping journey – in practice, unifying the entire process in the channel chosen by the user.
Flight tickets
In partnership with the digital travel agency Decolar, the company is working on the pilot of an AI agent that promises to cover the entire purchase journey, from search to payment.
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The tool will allow you to purchase tickets, for example, via WhatsApp, website chat or other addresses based on major language models, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Elo’s technology director (CTO), Eduardo Merighi, explains that, in the future, the company wants to expand the integration of the retailers’ catalog and ensure the entry of small and medium-sized companies into the ecosystem.
At the beginning, completion of the process will still depend on the participant’s authorization, for security reasons. “But, as the agent evolves and gets to know the user better, the tendency is that, in the coming months or years, the journey will become completely autonomous”, he highlights.
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Scale
From pilots to widespread consumer use, however, there is still a way to go. Diffusion will depend, in particular, on the level of retail adoption and the technological preparation of issuing banks.
The tendency is that, initially, the winning models are those that use vertical logic, that is, that work within a closed environment, such as a website, app or specific marketplace.
In the view of Frederico Succi, from Visa, the first use cases for this standard could begin to emerge this year. “Brazil is a large, competitive market, which forces rapid innovation”, highlights Succi.
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At the other end, through the horizontal model, the agent becomes a universal intermediary, not linked to a specific store. In it, the consumer requests a product or service and the platform searches, compares, chooses and buys anywhere available.
It is a more complex job, because it depends on the coordination of multiple links in the chain. “There is still no case on a scale of this model in the world”, comments Succi.
Regardless of the form adopted, industry participants are unanimous in their assessment that Brazil will be one of the protagonists of the agentic movement.
Research by Morning Consult, commissioned by Visa, showed that 7 in 10 Brazilians already use AI to compare prices, look for gift ideas or support purchasing decisions, a higher proportion than that observed in other markets.
Arnoni, from Mastercard, assesses that Brazilians are already prepared to embrace innovations in the payments sector, such as the rapid adoption of Pix, contactless payments and Tap On Phone (in which the cell phone turns into a machine).
“How much scale the agents will have will depend on how much the trade will evolve in this dynamic”, he points out.
