Visa says only 11% of small merchants are AI-agent ready

The Visa executive's comments land against a gap that runs through the whole report. Only 11% of small- to medium-sized businesses qualify as agent-ready, compared with 19% of large merchants, and just 15% of merchants overall have structured product data for agent access. Yet 68% expect AI agents to account for at least 5% of digital sales within two years — an expectation running well ahead of the plumbing beneath it.

Craven's argument is that this gap may not be a permanent disadvantage. Small businesses, she told PYMNTS, have a distinct ability to pivot and move faster, and with AI they can learn faster too. Her starting point is unglamorous: the product catalog. A description written for a human browsing a website may not give an AI model enough to answer a specific request, so merchants need precise descriptions, inventory, sizes, prices and payment options — with loyalty information mattering when shoppers ask AI to account for memberships or rewards.

For now, much of this remains at the discovery stage. Consumers use AI as a better search and still buy where they always buy, Webster noted, which creates a measurement problem: only 23% of merchants can clearly identify both AI-driven traffic and completed purchases. The same restraint shows elsewhere — kiosk pickup, voice ordering, scan-and-go and curbside all became less accessible, while merchants concentrated on checkout, payment choice and fraud controls. With 87% saying their checkout still needs improvement, the bet is that agent-readiness and the basics consumers already expect have to be solved together.