PayU and Visa launch AI agent shopping pilot in Poland

Tokens instead of card details

The solution does not hand sensitive card data to the AI agent. Instead it uses AI tokens, secure digital representations of payment credentials. With them, the agent can finalize a transaction within the parameters defined by the user, without the user's direct involvement at the payment step.

Visa says the pilot builds on security mechanisms already in use: card protection, identity verification and real-time fraud monitoring. The tokenized payment data is also bound to a specific AI agent, which is meant to keep its actions consistent with the user's instructions.

An ecosystem effort

Katarzyna Prus-Malinowska, Head of Product Management at PayU, said this is the company's latest pilot using AI tokens. She described it as a step towards payments becoming a seamless, automated part of shopping while remaining under the consumer's control.

In the agentic commerce model, the AI agent becomes a new participant in the buying process, so retailers, payment providers, banks and payment networks all need to cooperate. Paweł Nawrocki of Empik, which describes itself as one of Poland's largest omnichannel platforms, said agentic commerce is the next stage after product recommendations: completing the transaction for the customer.

Mateusz Oleksy, General Manager of Visa Poland, called the move from controlled-environment tests to a live payment pilot an important milestone for agentic commerce.