Visa wants to give AI agents your credit card so that they can shop and pay for you

Visa is planning to let AI agents use your credit card to buy things for you. This marks a notable step forward, moving these smart programs beyond just generating text or finding information to performing real-world tasks that involve spending money. AI agents (like OpenAI's Operator) are software programs or systems designed to perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions to achieve specific goals, often operating autonomously or semi-autonomously. Think of them as digital helpers built to act on your behalf within systems, able to control interfaces and interact with online services to complete tasks, like some experimental agents that can navigate a web browser. Until now, the missing piece for these agents has been secure and reliable payment access.

Visa believes connecting AI systems to its payment network could be genuinely revolutionary. Set a budget and preferences, and your AI agent could find and purchase items like groceries or plane tickets without you needing to tap "Checkout."

Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, told the AP he feels this initiative could be "transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself." Visa recently announced details of this program, called Visa Intelligent Commerce, aiming to bring trust and security to this new type of shopping. Launched today, pilot projects connect Visa's payments network to AI systems developed by Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and France's Mistral, with additional collaborations underway with IBM, Stripe, and Samsung. A broad rollout is expected next year.

For consumers, the promise is straightforward: your AI agent shops and pays within limits you set. Visa has spent six months addressing the technical and security challenges, including authentication, spending caps, and user authorization. The company is introducing "AI-Ready Cards," which use tokenized digital credentials instead of sensitive card details for security. This system requires explicit user consent and confirms an agent is allowed to act for you, adding identity verification. Only the consumer can tell the agent when to activate a payment credential.

Current AI shopping tools are good at finding items but struggle with the payment step. Jack Forestell highlighted this, saying, "The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments." He added,

You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, 'OK, you go buy it.'

By plugging into Visa's network, AI platforms can hand off the payment step to a proven system, using Visa's history of managing risk and fraud to vouch for legitimate transactions and step in if things go wrong. Safely letting autonomous AI agents handle money means preventing errors, sometimes called "hallucinations," that could misread details or take wrong actions, leading to incorrect purchases. Visa's system addresses this by requiring user authorization before any charge and enforcing the spending caps the consumer sets. Commerce signals are shared in real-time, enabling transaction controls and helping manage disputes. Initially, agents will likely seek confirmation on big buys like airline tickets, gradually earning autonomy within user-defined dollar limits.

AI developers see benefits too: with user consent, agents could potentially see past purchase history. This helps agents understand preferences and make better recommendations, like personalized suggestions on shopping sites.

Forestell thinks AI agents are best suited for routine errands or complex tasks like travel booking, where automation saves time. For enjoyable shopping experiences, agents might just assist in the background. By combining AI autonomy with Visa's payment expertise, the company aims to bring personalized, hands-free commerce closer to reality. Forestell believes that just like previous shifts in shopping, Visa is helping set a new standard for commerce, potentially as impactful as the birth of online shopping itself.

Source: AP News

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