Matt O’Brien
Artificial intelligence “agents” are assumed to be more than a chatbot. The tech industry has spent months on AI personal assistants who know what you want and can do real work on your behalf.
So far, they haven’t done much.
Visa wants to change that by offering a credit card. With your budget and some preferences set, these AI agents (ChatGpt and their successors to its chatbot peers) can find and buy sweaters, weekly groceries, or plane tickets.
“I think this is really important,” Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, said in an interview. “Transform, in order of magnitude of the appearance of e-commerce itself.”
Visa announced Wednesday it is partnering with a group of AI’s leading AI chatbot developers. Among them are US Business Humanity, Microsoft, Openai, Perplexity, and French Mistral, among others, connecting AI systems to Visa’s payment network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payments company Stripe, and phone maker Samsung on initiatives. The pilot project will begin Wednesday ahead of wider use that is expected next year.
San Francisco payment processing companies bet that what appears to be futuristic could become a convenient alternative to our most common shopping tasks in the near future. Over the past six months, we’ve worked with AI developers to address technical obstacles that the average consumer must overcome before using it.
For emerging AI companies, Visa’s support could also increase the chances of competing with Tech Giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and develop their own AI agents.
The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what is called agent AI, but there is nothing that we still can’t see in the real world. Most are modified versions of large language models. This is the generator AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarise documents, and help people code. Trained with a large amount of data, they can scrutinise the internet and get back recommendations about what they buy, but it’s hard to surpass them.
“The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are beginning to do a really good job in the shopping and discovery aspects of problem, but they have a big problem with paying,” Forestel said. “You get to this point where the agent literally turns it back and says, ‘OK, you’re going to buy it.’
We believe Visa plays an important role in providing AI agents with easier and more reliable access to the cash they need to purchase.
“Payment issues are not something that AI platforms can solve on their own,” says Forestell. “That’s why we started working with them.”
The new AI initiative comes from nearly a year when Visa revealed a major change in how credit and debit cards operate in the US, making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly unrelated.
Many consumers are already used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay, which converts their phones into credit cards. A similar process of reviewing someone’s digital credentials allows an AI agent to work on behalf of a customer. Forestell says buyers, banks and merchants must ensure that the transaction is justified and that Visa will handle the dispute.
Forestell said that it doesn’t mean that AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it could also help people who give birth to some people, such as food, home improvement items, and even Christmas lists, as well as people who are overly complicated like booking a trip. In such a situation, some people may want an agent “just get over it and go automatically and do things for us.”
Other shopping experiences, such as luxury goods, are a form of entertainment, and many customers want to immerse themselves in choosing and comparing. In that case, he assumes that the AI agent still provides assistance but stays in the background.
And what about credit card debt? According to the New York Federal Reserve, American consumer credit card balances reached $1.21 trillion at the end of last year.
Forestell says that consumers should give AI agents clear spending restrictions and conditions, giving them confidence that humans are still in control. Initially, the AI agent may return to the buyer to make sure that the ticket for a particular plane is fine. Over time, these agents may gain more autonomy by “expending up to $1,500 on the airline to get from A to B.”
What draws some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that with customer consent, AI agents can leverage a lot of data on past credit card purchases.
“Visa has the ability to agree that users will share a stream of transaction history with us,” says Dmitry Shevelenko, Chief Business Officer at Perplexity. “When generating recommendations, let’s say you’re asking, ‘What’s the best laptop?’ -We will know the other transactions you have made and the preferences that were revealed from them. ”
Perplexity chatbots can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it is still in the early stages of AI commerce, says Shevelenko. The San Francisco startup, along with ChatGpt maker Openai, told federal court that it would consider purchasing Google’s internet browser, Chrome, if the US forces the tech giant to part ways with pending antitrust laws.
Original issue: April 30, 2025, 3:46pm EDT
