Dive Brief:

• Payment processing giant Fiserv announced partnerships Monday with the major U.S. credit card networks, Visa and Mastercard, related to working together on evolving artificial intelligence-driven commerce tools.
• The collaboration with Visa will give Fiserv's merchant customers access to the credit card company's agentic commerce and protocol tools, which are designed to help AI shopping agents find products, a Fiserv news release said. The tools are also expected to distinguish legitimate agents from malicious bots.
• In a separate release, Milwaukee-based Fiserv said it will also give merchants access to Mastercard’s agent payments framework, which registers and verifies AI agents before they can make transactions using that card network.

Dive Insight:

“We are enabling merchants of all sizes to confidently participate in this new era of commerce, leveraging trusted standards and programmable payment," Sanjay Saraf, Fiserv's global chief product officer of merchant solutions, said in a statement included in both news releases Monday.

The releases did not say precisely when Fiserv's merchant customers will have access to these tools, and a company spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Artificial intelligence companies, such as OpenAI and Perplexity, have introduced tools for shoppers to search and compare prices for items they want to buy. These tools are known as AI agents and the process is known as agentic commerce.

Currently, most agents are used for comparison shopping, but they may eventually be empowered to make purchases on a shopper's behalf.

Visa and Mastercard both unveiled efforts to develop agentic commerce tools in the spring.

Visa has allowed software developers who are building such agents access to its payments rails, and has developed a protocol intended to assure merchants that certain AI agents are authentic.