Visa (NYSE: V) has released new research showing that consumer confidence will decide how quickly shoppers let artificial intelligence complete purchases on their behalf. The Visa Trust Index for agentic commerce, announced on September 9, 2026, measures attitudes toward a coming wave of AI-driven shopping in which software agents search, select, and pay without constant human input.
The study found a clear gap between everyday AI use and willingness to hand over payment authority. Seventy-two percent of US adults have already tried an AI assistant.
Yet only 23 percent said they would trust generative AI itself to execute a payment.
That hesitation recedes when a familiar payments brand is involved. Sixty-one percent of respondents named Visa as the company they would trust to handle agent-initiated transactions, the highest score among the payments, technology, and social-media names tested.
The advantage held across age and usage groups.
Among adults 18 to 34, trust in Visa rose to 68 percent.
Frequent AI users registered 71 percent.
The results suggest shoppers separate the tools they use for discovery from the networks they rely on to move money.
They may experiment with many assistants, but they still look for a recognized payments brand before they allow an agent to spend.Oliver Jenkyn, Visa’s group president, framed the findings as part of a longer pattern.
Earlier shifts such as e-commerce and mobile wallets succeeded only after consumers felt payments remained secure.
He argued that the same requirement will apply as agents begin to shop independently.
“Trust will be foundational,” he said, adding that people will turn to established payment experiences as they give AI more autonomy.Visa positioned the research as both a snapshot and a roadmap.
For more than six decades the company has built security and reliability into successive forms of commerce.
It is now working with partners to create standards, identity checks, authentication methods, and consumer controls that would let an authorized agent complete a transaction without exposing card details or removing the cardholder’s ability to set limits.
Initiatives grouped under Visa Intelligent Commerce are intended to supply that infrastructure.
The company said it will keep tracking sentiment as the technology matures, because expectations themselves are still forming.
Shoppers are beginning to articulate what they want from the firms that will sit between them and autonomous agents.
Visa’s message is that those firms must supply both innovation and a durable sense of safety.
The underlying survey was conducted by The Harris Poll between May 26 and 28, 2026.
A nationally representative sample of 2,065 U.S. adults answered the questions; brand-specific payment-trust items were asked of roughly 1,030 respondents each.
The sample was weighted to match US Census demographics.
The data portray a public that is already comfortable asking AI for help yet still cautious about letting it spend. Visa’s research concludes that the brands that close that trust gap will determine how fast agentic commerce moves from experiment to everyday practice.