Visa's Marcel Hajdoš: soon AI agents will shop and pay for us

Marcel Hajdoš, Visa's head for Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia, is convinced that the next era of online shopping will belong to autonomous AI agents that search for products, compare prices and pay on a person's behalf. In his view, if the last decade was the era of mobile payments, the next one will be the era of “agentic shopping.”

Hajdoš has worked at Visa for more than twenty years and was effectively one of two people who launched the company's Prague office, which served the entire Czech card and terminal market. Today he oversees Visa's operations across three countries at once, and his focus has shifted toward artificial intelligence technology.

The idea is simple: a user tells an AI agent — in ChatGPT or Claude, for instance — the parameters of a purchase: the product, the desired delivery time, the maximum price, and then steps back from the process entirely. The agent checks dozens of online stores on its own, finds the best offer, places the order and makes the payment.

Visa's key task in this process is to preserve the same level of trust and security that people are used to with ordinary bank cards. “We want the same highly secure, convenient environment we built for contactless cards and mobile payments to work exactly the same way in e-commerce,” Hajdoš explains.

Technically, when a card is linked to an AI system, the card number is tokenized — neither the agent nor the merchant ever sees it in the clear. Visa protects both the buyer and the seller at once: it matters to the merchant to be certain that a purchase request comes from a certified agent rather than a fraudulent bot.

According to Hajdoš, Visa is developing standards and trust mechanisms for interactions between cardholders, AI agents and merchants. The company is also exploring broader use of stablecoins for cross-border settlements, which would allow transactions to go through even outside traditional banking hours.

These ambitions make sense given the current state of the Czech e-commerce market: online purchases account for just 15–20% of total card transactions in Czechia, whereas in the UK offline and online purchases are split almost evenly, 50-50. Hajdoš notes that Czechs were long fairly conservative about online payments, and it took the COVID-19 pandemic to get them used to ordering even everyday goods through services like Rohlík or Košík.

Today, growing trust in digital payments is being reinforced by Apple Pay, Google Pay and the global Click to Pay standard, developed by a consortium of the market's biggest players, including Visa. In Hajdoš's view, the arrival of AI agents in shopping will be a natural continuation of this trend — an autonomous agent can process far more information than a person, and many times faster.