Something real shifted in commerce this year, and most of the commentary around it is focused on the wrong question.
Visa recently announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to bring secure, identity-verified payments directly into AI-driven shopping experiences. Major payment networks don't make moves like that on a hunch — they make them when a category has crossed from experimental into something worth building real infrastructure around. Agentic commerce, the idea that an AI assistant can discover, decide, and complete a purchase on someone's behalf, is no longer a thought experiment. It's a deployment target.
The industry conversation around this, though, keeps collapsing into one narrow question: can an AI agent successfully place an order? Increasingly, yes. New protocols for letting agents discover merchants and call their tools are maturing quickly, and "the agent created a cart and checked out" demos are everywhere.
That's the easy 80%. Travel is where the other 20% lives, and it's the part nobody's marketing slide wants to talk about.
Why travel breaks the standard playbook
