Visa and Mastercard ready AI payment rails; pilots live, rollout as early as Q1 2026

Visa and Mastercard are building payment rails that let AI agents search, compare, book, and pay within chat interfaces, a model positioned as agentic commerce. Company leaders say pilots with select users and merchants are live, and a Visa executive allegedly indicated commercial rollout could start as soon as Q1 2026 on platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini.