Unlocking the Potential: AWS and Visa’s Blueprint for AI Commerce Agent Coordination

Agentic Commerce: The Future of Buying and Selling

As the necessary infrastructure for agentic commerce continues to develop, enterprises are faced with the challenge of determining how to participate in this new form of buying and selling. However, the landscape remains fragmented, with competing payment protocols and uncertainty surrounding the preparations required by enterprises.

Fortunately, more cloud providers and AI model companies are stepping up to provide the tools needed for enterprises to start building agentic commerce-enabled systems.

AWS is one such company, set to list Visa’s Intelligence Commerce platform on the AWS Marketplace. This move aims to simplify the process for enterprises to connect to tools that facilitate agentic payments and accelerate the adoption of agentic commerce.

While Amazon has not yet implemented Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), the collaboration signifies the growing importance of agentic commerce for enterprises.

Scott Mullins, AWS managing director of worldwide financial services, highlighted that listing the platform on AWS Marketplace enables secure payment capabilities that seamlessly integrate with Visa’s system, offering developers pre-built frameworks and standardized infrastructure to overcome major development challenges.

In addition to listing Visa’s platform, AWS and Visa will publish blueprints to the public Bedrock AgentCore repository, significantly reducing development time and complexity for creating various agents, such as travel booking agents and retail shopping agents.

The Visa Intelligence Commerce platform, compatible with the Merchant Category Code (MCP), allows enterprises to connect agents running on it to other agents, facilitating seamless communication.

Key Considerations for Enterprises

Through the Visa Intelligence Commerce platform, AWS customers gain access to authentication, agentic tokenization, and data personalization tools, enabling organizations to register and connect their agents to Visa’s payment infrastructure securely.

The platform ensures the protection of credit card details through tokenized digital credentials and allows companies to establish guidelines for agent transactions, including spending limits.

Rubali Birwadker, SVP and global head of growth at Visa, emphasized that bringing the platform to AWS enhances scalability, driving faster innovation for developers and improving experiences for consumers and businesses globally.

Mullins pointed out that Visa and AWS are laying the foundational infrastructure for developers and businesses to embark on agentic commerce projects. However, successful implementation requires developers to coordinate multiple agents and understand diverse industry requirements.

For effective coordination and secure communication, the MCP connection plays a crucial role in linking an organization’s agents to Visa’s platform while upholding identity and security.

Blueprints for Seamless Agentic Commerce

The primary challenge hindering enterprises from exploring agentic commerce lies in the fragmentation of commerce systems, leading to integration complexities.

To address this issue, AWS and Visa are developing reference architecture blueprints that serve as starting points for developers, leveraging AWS’s cloud infrastructure and Visa’s trusted payment network to establish a standardized, secure foundation for agentic commerce.

These reference blueprints offer a framework for enterprise developers, solution architects, and software vendors to follow when creating new workflows, in collaboration with industry leaders like Expedia Group, Intuit, and Eurostars Hotel company.

Aligned with the Visa Intelligent Commerce MCP server and APIs, the blueprints will be managed through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, aiming to facilitate agentic commerce at scale with real-time reasoning and coordination capabilities.

These blueprints are designed to evolve into composable, reusable workflows for organizations looking to develop various agents, from travel booking agents to retail shopping agents, catering to a wide range of use cases.

Advancements in Agentic Commerce

Agentic commerce, where agents handle product searching, cart adding, and payments, is rapidly emerging as the next frontier for AI innovation.

Leading companies such as OpenAI and Google have introduced AI-powered shopping tools to streamline product discovery and enable seamless interactions with agents. Browsers like OpenAI’s Atlas and Comet from Perplexity are instrumental in connecting agents to websites, enhancing the shopping experience.

Notably, retailers like Walmart and Target have integrated with ChatGPT, allowing users to search for items through chat interactions. To ensure secure transactions, initiatives such as the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) by OpenAI and Stripe, as well as Google’s Agent Pay Protocol (AP2), in collaboration with industry giants like American Express, Mastercard, PayPal, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, are paving the way for safe and reliable agentic commerce.

While the foundation for agentic commerce is in place, successful implementation hinges on thoughtful design considerations that address industry-specific needs and system requirements, leveraging the standardized infrastructure and blueprints available.