AI has revolutionized daily activities like writing, programming, and shopping. Recently, Visa launched a project to ready its payment network for a new era of autonomous AI shopping experiences.
This week, the company introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce at the Visa Global Product Drop. As stated in the announcement, this initiative allows developers and engineers to access Visa’s payment network to create autonomous AI shopping experiences that locate and purchase products on behalf of users.
In addition, Visa Intelligent Commerce serves as a partner program for AI platforms, featuring a comprehensive set of integrated APIs that developers can use to implement Visa’s AI commerce functionalities.
Visa claims that the program provides AI-enabled credit cards, which substitute traditional card details with tokenized digital credentials; AI-driven personalization, which shares essential Visa spending and purchase insights (with user consent) to enhance agent performance; and AI payments, enabling AI agents to conduct transactions under specific guidelines set by the user.
Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, likened this current wave of change to the transition from physical shopping to online shopping and then to mobile shopping, with AI establishing a fresh benchmark for commerce.
“Soon, people will have AI agents that can search, choose, purchase, and manage products for them,” Forestell stated. “These agents must be trusted with payment transactions, not just by users, but also by banks and sellers.”
To implement this initiative, Visa plans to partner with several leaders in the AI industry, including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, Stripe, and others.
Consumers are increasingly depending on AI to shop on their behalf, efficiently locating precisely what they want in less time. For instance, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have added AI-driven shopping features to their chatbots, aiding users in finding products through conversation.
Visa’s initiative advances this concept by streamlining the payment process in the AI-enhanced commerce landscape, providing merchants and shoppers with a smoother and safer personalized experience. Other payment networks have initiated similar efforts.
Recently, Mastercard revealed Mastercard Agent Pay, its agent-based AI payment initiative. This program aims to provide enhanced security and personalization in payment experiences during the AI era. The company notes that the program introduces Mastercard Agentic Tokens and collaborates with Microsoft to explore new use cases and “scale agentic commerce.”
When you shop online next, you might want to use ChatGPT to assist you. This is because the AI has been given a new capability — one that can find the right products and let you purchase the one you desire.
Available to Plus, Pro, and Free users, this experimental shopping experience was announced in an X post on Monday by OpenAI, aimed at helping users find, compare, and buy products through AI. This feature is being rolled out to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users, and it will also be accessible to those without a ChatGPT account. The rollout is expected to be complete within a few days, and the AI will provide improved product results, as well as pricing and reviews, along with direct purchasing links.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, the parent company of ZDNET, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging infringement of Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Any online retailer can show up in the results as long as they haven’t opted out of OpenAI’s search crawler. The company assures that results are independently selected and not categorized as advertisements, which should lead to a diverse range of merchants being displayed.
OpenAI is also looking into a simpler method for retailers to submit their product feeds directly to ChatGPT. This would guarantee that the results are more precise and up-to-date than those acquired via the regular search crawler. Interested merchants can complete a form on the product discovery page to be alerted when submissions are open.
How does this function for the typical consumer?
Suppose you need to purchase a particular type of product, whether for yourself or as a gift for someone else. Go to the ChatGPT page and log in if you have an account. At the prompt, type and submit a description of the product you are seeking.
For instance, I requested ChatGPT to suggest the best 14-inch Copilot+ PC laptops. In reply, the AI presented several models that matched my criteria. A Highlights & Recommendations section outlined key features, such as the best display, premium build, and long battery life, along with the top laptop in each category.
A carousel displayed images, names, and basic details for each suggested PC. I had the option to inquire about a particular laptop. Clicking on the name or picture of a computer opened a sidebar that contained more information and links to reviews from various websites.
In this section, I could also press a button to purchase a specific item from one or more retailers. While browsing through the different products, I encountered major retailers like Best Buy, ASUS, Dell, Microsoft, and Walmart, as well as smaller ones such as Swing Computers, TeciSoft, and FireOwls.
This turned out to be a decent initial attempt, but later experiences were inconsistent, mainly because I didn’t always receive the updated shopping interface. At times, ChatGPT merely presented a list of products in its usual manner, without any links for further investigation or purchasing a specific item. Even attempting to rephrase my request didn’t seem to help.
I also found no means to control when the shopping interface would appear. Occasionally, I might want to view the shopping and purchasing links; other times, I might prefer a standard list of products without buying links. An OpenAI representative indicated that there are currently no plans to introduce additional controls, but enhancements are expected to develop from early usage.
Still, as a trial run, the new feature is certainly an intriguing and potentially beneficial way to save time and effort when shopping online.
Artificial intelligence “agents” are intended to be more than just chatbots. The tech sector has spent several months promoting AI personal assistants that understand your needs and can perform tasks on your behalf.
So far, their impact has been limited.
Visa aims to change this by providing them with your credit card. By establishing a budget and certain preferences, these AI agents — the successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot counterparts — could locate and purchase items like a sweater, weekly groceries, or an airline ticket.
“We believe this could be very significant,” stated Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview. “Transformational, comparable to the advent of e-commerce itself.”
On Wednesday, Visa announced it is collaborating with several prominent AI chatbot developers — including U.S. companies Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Perplexity, and France’s Mistral — to integrate their AI systems with Visa’s payment network. Visa is also partnering with IBM, online payment provider Stripe, and phone manufacturer Samsung for the initiative. Pilot projects are set to launch Wednesday, with broader adoption anticipated next year.
The San Francisco payment processing firm is confident that what seems futuristic today could evolve into a convenient alternative for our everyday shopping tasks in the near future. It has dedicated the last six months to working with AI developers to tackle technical challenges that must be addressed before average consumers will start using it.
For emerging AI companies, Visa’s support could enhance their ability to compete with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are creating their own AI agents.
The technology sector is already filled with demonstrations showcasing the capabilities of what is termed agentic AI, although few have made it into practical use. Many are still modified iterations of large language models — the generative AI technology that powers chatbots capable of writing emails, summarizing documents, or assisting in coding. Trained on extensive data sets, they can search the internet and provide product recommendations, but they struggle with additional tasks.
“The initial phases of agent-based commerce are starting to excel in the shopping and discovery aspects of the issue, but they face significant difficulties with payment processing,” Forestell noted. “You reach a point where the agents essentially give it back to the user and say, ‘Alright, you handle the purchase.’”
Visa perceives its role as crucial in providing AI agents with reliable, easier access to the funds they require to make purchases.
“The payment issue is not something that AI platforms can resolve on their own,” Forestell remarked. “That’s why we initiated collaboration with them.”
This new AI initiative follows Visa’s announcement nearly a year ago regarding significant changes in how credit and debit cards operate in the U.S., rendering physical cards and their 16-digit numbers progressively less relevant.
Many consumers are already adapting to digital payment methods like Apple Pay, which turn their smartphones into credit cards. A comparable process for vetting a person’s digital credentials would authorize AI agents to function on a customer’s behalf, in a manner Forestell asserts must ensure legitimacy for buyers, banks, and merchants while allowing Visa to manage disputes.
Forestell mentioned that this doesn’t imply that AI agents will completely dominate the shopping experience, but they may be beneficial for tasks that some people find tedious — like buying groceries, home improvement supplies, or even compiling Christmas lists — or those that are overly complex, such as planning travel. In these scenarios, there might be individuals who prefer an agent that “simply pushes through it and handles tasks for us,” as Forestell stated.
For other shopping experiences, like those involving luxury items, the process is more of a leisure activity, and many shoppers still desire to engage deeply with their options and comparisons, according to Forestell. In these instances, he imagines AI agents providing support while remaining in a supporting role.
Regarding credit card debt, the balances on credit cards held by American consumers reached $1.21 trillion by the end of the previous year, as reported by the Federal Reserve of New York.
Forestell believes consumers will establish clear spending limits and guidelines for their AI agents, ensuring that they feel confident retaining control. Initially, these AI agents will likely consult buyers to confirm their approval for a specific flight ticket. Eventually, those agents may gain more independence to “spend up to $1,500 on any airline to transport me from A to B,” he explained.
A key factor drawing some AI developers to collaborate with Visa is that, with a customer’s permission, an AI agent can access extensive data regarding previous credit card transactions.
“Visa enables a user to agree to share streams of their transaction history with us,” stated Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer. “When we create a recommendation — for instance, if you ask, ‘What are the best laptops?’ — we would analyze other transactions you’ve made and your expressed preferences from that.”
Perplexity’s chatbot is capable of booking hotels and making other purchases already, but Shevelenko emphasizes that AI commerce is still in its infancy. Additionally, the San Francisco startup has indicated, alongside OpenAI, to a federal court that it would contemplate acquiring Google’s web browser, Chrome, if the U.S. mandates a breakup of the tech company due to an ongoing antitrust case.