Visa's Intelligent Commerce Connect, announced April 8, supports four agent payment protocols through a single integration point and accepts non-Visa cards. The openness is genuine. But the structural parallel to cloud runtimes is worth sitting with. Both layers advertise protocol agnosticism while quietly accumulating state that agents depend on: tokenized credentials and spend controls for Visa, task context and governance logs for cloud providers.
Visa predicts millions of consumers will use agents for purchases by the 2026 holiday season. The lock-in won't live in the protocols. It'll live in the state.