Agentic AI and payments redefine commerce, visa eyes 1% GDP boost

By early 2026, NiCE’s agentic AI platforms had demonstrated transformative impacts on customer experience, delivering up to a 20% increase in customer satisfaction and over 80% containment rates in enterprise deployments. This leap was driven by a strategic shift from traditional scripted automation to autonomous, goal-driven AI systems that accelerate deployment, reduce costs, and free human agents to focus on higher-value tasks. NiCE positioned agentic AI as the foundational architecture for customer experience and marketing operations, supported by educational initiatives like the Agentic AI Masterclass series to prepare industry leaders for this new paradigm.

NiCE’s award-winning AI-driven customer engagement platform revolutionizes how enterprises operationalize AI by automatically discovering, engineering, and deploying production-ready AI agents from real engagement data, eliminating lengthy pilot phases and fragmented automation. This unified digital front door integrates discovery, deployment, and governance, continuously learning from billions of interactions annually to optimize business impact. Innovations unveiled at Nexus 2026, such as embedded multivariate testing and enhanced conversation analytics, enable seamless human-AI collaboration and support unified multimodal experiences, positioning agentic AI as a continuous improvement engine and core driver of enterprise growth.

Real-world deployments at enterprises like Currys showcase the tangible benefits of NiCE’s agentic AI in unifying customer interactions across voice, email, and social channels, resulting in a six-point net promoter score increase during initial migration and over 20 points in specific areas within 18 months. The platform’s ability to reduce repeat contacts, streamline service processes, and provide a single, transcribed, and analyzed view of customer interactions empowers managers to identify service breakdowns and continuously improve. As Currys’ Director of Customer Management Centre Chris Stroud emphasized, this unified approach enables faster issue resolution and personalized service, while NiCE International highlights Currys as a leading example of transforming retail customer journeys through automation and orchestration.

In the healthcare sector, Bluecrest’s adoption of NiCE CXone exemplifies how embedding agentic AI deeply into workflows drives operational resilience and superior customer engagement. Achieving a 94% call answer rate and £250,000 in annual savings by reducing after-call work, Bluecrest leverages AI-powered tools like AutoSummary and Copilot to reduce advisor cognitive load and automate documentation, enabling agents to focus on high-value interactions. This AI augmentation boosted key product conversations from 10% to 70%, resulting in over 2,200 new subscriptions, while real-time dashboards and continuous interaction analysis shifted the contact center from reactive to insight-driven operations, fundamentally transforming customer experience and efficiency at scale.

By early 2026, Visa recognized that existing payment systems, designed primarily for human interaction, posed significant friction for autonomous AI agents executing transactions. Michele Herron, Visa’s SVP, highlighted the necessity of a payment infrastructure that could unify identity verification, risk signals, and contextual data in real time to authenticate AI agents and confirm consumer intent. Anticipating that AI personal assistants would evolve from simple reorder tasks to managing complex purchasing decisions within a few years, Visa proactively began building systems to bridge this gap and support seamless, secure agentic commerce at scale.

Complementing Visa’s efforts, Clink launched a comprehensive payment and billing platform tailored specifically for AI developers, enabling global acceptance of payments from both human customers and authorized AI agents. Supporting over 135 currencies and 100 local payment methods, Clink’s infrastructure offers advanced features like subscription and outcome-based pricing, smart routing, and managed compliance operations. A standout innovation is Clink’s integration skill that automates payment setup for coding agents such as Cursor and Claude Code, allowing AI agents to transact directly with merchants through standard payment networks without requiring manual engineering or processor migration.

Visa’s pioneering proof of concept demonstrated the transformative potential of agentic commerce by enabling AI agents to autonomously execute microtransactions for digital services directly via command line interfaces, eliminating the need for human approval or manual input like CVV codes. This seamless and secure payment infrastructure not only streamlines AI-driven transactions but also carries significant economic implications; Visa’s management estimates that agentic commerce could contribute an additional 80 to 150 basis points to global GDP growth, representing over 1% of total economic output and underscoring the vast potential of AI-powered autonomous purchasing.

NCR Voyix has transformed traditional retail software by evolving from monolithic applications into a modern, cloud-to-edge unified commerce platform that integrates software, payments, services, and edge-enabled execution. This microservices-based architecture preserves decades of proven retail business logic while enabling modularity, scalability, and faster innovation cycles, allowing retailers to modernize operations without replacing existing systems and adopt innovation at their own pace.

Designed as a foundation for the emerging agentic commerce model, the Voyix platform orchestrates clean data, structured APIs, inventory visibility, pricing accuracy, and loyalty context to support AI-driven shopping experiences. By making commerce both human-friendly and machine-readable, NCR Voyix enables AI agents to discover, govern, and safely execute retail transactions in real-world environments, ensuring critical functions like checkout and payments continue reliably even with imperfect network connectivity.

NCR Voyix’s comprehensive portfolio—including POS, self-checkout, back office, supply chain, insights, loyalty, and payments—unifies disparate retail operations to reduce operational seams and enhance resilience and control. This holistic approach is exemplified by AS Watson’s multi-year adoption of the Voyix Commerce Platform across 17,000+ stores in 31 markets, spanning brands like Watsons and Superdrug, marking a significant industry shift toward cloud-based unified commerce platforms that consolidate technology stacks to boost customer experience and operational efficiency on a global scale.

By mid-2026, NielsenIQ had strategically embedded AI-powered market intelligence tools directly into enterprise workflows, unveiling platforms like NIQ Cadence that unify 19 specialized AI agents to consolidate fragmented marketing data and automate actionable insights. This modular system, featuring components such as MyCadence and CadenceAI, streamlines decision-making and breaks down data silos, enabling marketing leaders to achieve real-time, measurable impact on AI-driven commerce and marketing effectiveness.

Building on its expansive AI strategy, NielsenIQ partnered with The OpenAI Deployment Company to integrate proprietary consumer intelligence and generative AI capabilities seamlessly into client platforms through the NIQ Optiq Suite. Tools like Optiq Chat and Optiq Bridge empower brands to query business questions and embed trusted data within their own environments, all anchored by a massive 160-petabyte AI-ready data foundation that encompasses 260 million product items and over 10 billion product attributes, ensuring faster, more confident decisions.

In a forward-looking collaboration with Similarweb, NielsenIQ is pioneering an Agentic Commerce Measurement solution designed to decode AI's influence on consumer behavior in the emerging agentic economy. Launching in late 2026, this tool will track critical metrics such as consumer intent, AI-driven traffic, and conversion rates across platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, bridging discovery to verified purchases and offering brands actionable insights to optimize AI-mediated shopping journeys.

Visa is strategically transforming itself from a traditional payments company into a tech hyperscaler by aggressively investing in AI-driven product innovation and stablecoin infrastructure. CEO Ryan McInerney emphasizes that agentic commerce and AI are expanding Visa’s addressable market, with the company launching over 150 AI applications and restructuring product teams into nimble squads that accelerate feature development by 65%. This shift is complemented by Visa’s multi-coin, multi-chain stablecoin strategy, including participation in the Open Standard group launching Open USD and integration with Pismo, positioning Visa at the forefront of next-gen commerce ecosystems.

Value-added services have emerged as a robust secondary growth engine for Visa, now accounting for 30% of net revenue and growing over 25% annually. Fueled by AI-enhanced capabilities in risk management, fraud prevention, and marketing—such as the large transaction model that increases fraud value capture by up to five times—this segment generated $3.8 billion in revenue, boosted by network product adoption and marquee event marketing like the FIFA World Cup. Despite margin pressures from rising operating expenses and a $563 million severance charge linked to tech and product role reductions, Visa is reinvesting efficiency gains into high-growth areas to sustain long-term profitability.

Visa’s financial outlook reflects strong confidence in its diversified growth strategy, with guidance projecting net revenue growth in the high end of low double digits and full-year EPS growth in the low to mid teens, even as it navigates headwinds from market volatility and fading event-driven boosts. This optimism is underscored by a record $7.9 billion quarterly stock buyback and a newly authorized $20 billion multi-year repurchase plan, signaling management’s conviction that AI, stablecoins, and value-added services will drive sustained shareholder value and position Visa as a critical 'hyperscaling bridge layer' for emerging AI-powered commerce platforms.

To cement its role in the evolving agentic commerce landscape, Visa is forging strategic partnerships with AI leaders like OpenAI and Meta to enable secure payments within AI-driven shopping experiences, viewing this evolution as inevitable and transformative akin to the advent of e-commerce and tap-to-pay. Complementing these efforts, Visa is investing in developer tools such as the Visa CLI to facilitate seamless payment integration for AI agents and digital services, thereby maintaining its central position in next-generation commerce ecosystems that rely on autonomous AI agents managing microtransactions and data consumption.

By mid-2026, it became clear that the true power of human-AI collaboration in customer experience lies in their complementary strengths: AI excels at managing routine, predictable tasks with speed and precision, freeing human agents to engage in the nuanced, emotional, and strategic interactions that build trust and loyalty. This dynamic enables brands to move beyond mere efficiency, focusing instead on delivering relevance and fostering genuine connections, which ultimately become the key competitive differentiators in an increasingly frictionless marketplace.