Market Pulse
Market Pulse
The Goal and the Line Item
A purchasing card knows what you can't buy. Wrong merchant category, declined at the register. Over the spending limit, declined before a human ever sees it. Thirty years of delegated spending authority, encoded into infrastructure so reliable it's invisible. Now Visa and Mastercard are extending that same infrastructure to AI agents.
Card networks have always governed delegates. An agent, though, doesn't swipe a card and wait for approval. It takes a human's stated goal, breaks it into a sequence of transactions, and executes them. Each charge can look perfectly reasonable on its own. Whether they add up to what anyone actually wanted is a question the infrastructure was never designed to ask.
The Goal and the Line Item
A purchasing card knows what you can't buy. Wrong merchant category, declined at the register. Over the spending limit, declined before a human ever sees it. Thirty years of delegated spending authority, encoded into infrastructure so reliable it's invisible. Now Visa and Mastercard are extending that same infrastructure to AI agents.
Card networks have always governed delegates. An agent, though, doesn't swipe a card and wait for approval. It takes a human's stated goal, breaks it into a sequence of transactions, and executes them. Each charge can look perfectly reasonable on its own. Whether they add up to what anyone actually wanted is a question the infrastructure was never designed to ask.
Research Readings
GDPval: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World Economically Valuable Tasks
Single-attempt deliverable quality with full context provided. Iterative workflows, ambiguous briefs, and repeated-run reliability sit outside the frame entirely.
The benchmark excludes human oversight costs, consistency across runs, and the under-specified prompts that characterize most real enterprise work.
Research Readings
GPT-5.4 Professional-Matching Results on GDPval
Spreadsheet modeling and presentation quality saw the sharpest gains, suggesting structured-output tasks are where capability is advancing fastest.
Producing a strong deliverable once and producing one reliably enough to skip human review remain very different problems.
Research Readings
Visa/Morning Consult: Consumer and Business Readiness for AI-Mediated Commerce
Nearly four in ten Americans report AI already changing what they buy, not just how they shop. That's behavioral, not hypothetical.
Over half of surveyed businesses would authorize agent-to-agent negotiation, a willingness measured before most agentic commerce infrastructure went live.
Research Readings
Visa and Partners Complete Secure AI-Agent Transactions
Visa expects mainstream AI-agent purchasing by late 2026, with identity and authorization standards being built alongside adoption rather than ahead of it.
Consumer willingness and infrastructure buildout are running in parallel. The behavior isn't waiting for the plumbing to finish.
Negotiation Dynamics
Visa's recent B2AI report found that 53% of U.S. businesses would let AI agents negotiate prices or terms directly with other AI agents. That number deserves a slower read, because it quietly assumes something nobody has solved: what happens when both sides of a commercial interaction are optimizing autonomously?
The principal-agent problem is old economics. You delegate, your delegate's incentives drift. Agent-to-agent negotiation compounds it. Two optimization functions collide, and the emergent dynamics belong to neither principal. Research spanning over 180,000 AI-to-AI negotiations found agents developing tactics with no human analogue, including strategic concealment of reasoning from counterparts. Nobody designed that behavior. It surfaced on its own.
Further Reading
