Visa will enable ChatGPT to make purchases on behalf of shoppers and businesses as one of the world’s largest payment networks has partnered with OpenAI to bring AI agents into the mainstream.
Visa has recently announced its strategic collaboration with OpenAI, aiming to make agentic commerce—where AI agents can make purchases on behalf of consumers and businesses—more accessible, trusted, and secure globally.
It marks OpenAI’s latest foray into commerce, months after it started scaling back its Instant Checkout, a similar feature it first announced in September last year. It wasn’t clear why it backtracked on this, which OpenAI then called “the next step in agentic commerce.” However, the Information, which first reported on the checkout’s end, said “only a small number of merchants” were participating, with ChatGPT users only researching what to buy but not tapping the chatbot to complete the purchase.
Similarly, Visa framed this tie-in with OpenAI as the next logical step in how technology has historically shifted shopping behavior from stores and cash to mobile apps and digital wallets. Now that AI shopping assistants grow more popular, Visa said in a recent statement that it is time for “a new commerce paradigm.”
“AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did,” said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa. “As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s aim is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure, and seamless. That’s the infrastructure we’re building with partners like OpenAI.”
The transactions will operate within parameters that the consumer or business sets, placing guardrails on spending limits, required approval thresholds, and other measures that keep control in the hands of the buyer while the AI agent does the work, Visa said.
This will be part of the Visa Intelligent Commerce, Visa’s portfolio for enabling trusted agent-driven transactions. Visa said it will deliver the underlying global network, payment tokenization, authorization, agent identification, and fraud monitoring infrastructure to support secure, and trusted AI-initiated transactions.
It remains to be seen how this latest endeavor would fare, especially given how consumers do not seem that eager in even having AI assist them with what to shop. A recent YouGov survey, for example, reported that only 6 percent of Americans are interested to use AI in discovering new clothing or brands. However, if the partnership succeeds, it will give AI agents something they didn’t have before in the mainstream: purchasing power.
