AI payments in Czechia: Visa’s Marcel Hajdoš on what comes next

Shopping and payments with the help of artificial intelligence are not a matter of the distant future but of the coming months. So says Marcel Hajdoš, head of Visa in Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary. He is convinced that Czechs will get used to paying for purchases through AI as quickly as they got used to earlier payment innovations.

Czech shoppers are moving online fast and are among the leaders in e-commerce in Central and Eastern Europe, ahead of even the UK and France. But they are still cautious about AI payments. According to figures Hajdoš presented at the October Lepší Česko conference, 60% of Czechs use AI to search for products, but only a fifth are ready to entrust it with their payment details. If the Visa logo appears on the page, the level of trust rises to 70%. In Hajdoš’s words, the job of a strong brand is to convince people that an entire transaction can be completed safely with AI.

The talk is of so-called agentic payments: transactions that an autonomous AI agent makes, approves or initiates on a person’s behalf. The user gives a general command, such as buying the cheapest flight or a subscription on promotion, and the program pays for the service or goods straight away, without entering a card number and without confirmation in a banking app.

Visa is responsible for making these payments as secure as possible. “We are building an environment between the customer and the shop that matches the parameters of ordinary retail outlets. When you pay by card or phone, you first look at the terminal. You see the familiar Visa brand and you pay. After all, you wouldn’t tap your phone just anywhere,” Hajdoš says by way of comparison.

Czechs, he says, are very open to payment innovations, something he has seen repeatedly in his twenty years at the world’s largest electronic payments network. That is exactly why Visa often tests new products on the Czech market.

Buying through AI agents is already possible at some retailers, such as Rohlik and Kiwi, where interest is growing by hundreds of percent. At the beginning of June, together with its partner Česká spořitelna, Visa carried out the first agentic transaction in a commercial environment. “Everything is ready; now we need to teach the customer what to do in the agentic environment,” Hajdoš says.

It is just as important to prepare online shops themselves for agentic payments so that they can get the most out of the technology. The executive is optimistic about the outlook for the Czech market: in his words, there is an excellent environment, strong people, an innovative customer and shops that want to sell, so growth can be accelerated year after year.

By the Around Prague newsroom