Inception and Visa Champion AI-Driven Commerce Across Emerging Markets

Editorial Team

Last updated 26-01-2026

3 min

Inception and Visa are teaming up to push “agentic commerce” across CEMEA markets.

Visa’s payments infrastructure will let AI agents “browse, decide and pay” securely.

The tie-up combines Inception’s AI models with Visa’s tokenisation and authentication tools.

Both firms plan pilots and new commerce tools, stressing trust as “make-or-break”.

Founders see promise for procurement, though clear guardrails will be essential.

Inception, the Abu Dhabi–based AI company backed by G42, has teamed up with Visa to push agentic commerce further into the mainstream across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The partnership centres on integrating Visa Intelligent Commerce into Inception’s agent‑driven solutions, with the aim of letting AI agents browse, decide and pay on behalf of users in a way that’s secure and, crucially, trusted. It sounds futuristic, but for founders in the region, it’s starting to feel spot on rather than sci‑fi.

Agentic commerce, in simple terms, is when software agents do the shopping legwork for you: discovering products, comparing prices and completing payments autonomously. For merchants and banks, though, that can be a bit of a faff without the right safeguards. This is where Visa’s infrastructure comes in, offering tokenisation, passkey-based authentication and systems that give AI agents a verified identity on Visa’s network. Pair that with Inception’s domain-specific large language models and enterprise AI stack, and you’ve got something that can actually work at scale, not just in a lab demo.

The two companies also plan to co-develop new agent-based commerce tools and support pilot programmes and client showcases around the region. Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception, said the collaboration would help ensure AI-driven transactions are built on “a trusted payments foundation”, adding that the goal is to give merchants and digital platforms the tools they need for frictionless commerce. From Visa’s side, Godfrey Sullivan, Head of Product and Solutions for CEMEA, pointed out that trust will be the make-or-break factor as AI agents become more common in shopping and payments.

I remember chatting with founders at a MENA startup meetup not long ago, where procurement automation kept coming up as a real pain point. Tools like this could, I reckon, remove a lot of manual grunt work if they’re rolled out carefully. On the flip side, I’m not a fan of hype for hype’s sake, and agentic commerce will definately need clear guardrails to win over cautious businesses. Still, for readers around Arageek who’ve watched AI evolve from dashboards to decision-makers, this move feels chuffed to bits with where the market is heading… well, almost there, you know?

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