Visa announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers to connect their systems to Visa's payments network.
The aim is to outsource personal budgeting jobs to AI bots. Users will be able to set preferences and spending limits, then the AI agents will search for products and complete purchases.
Partner companies include US firms Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France's Mistral. Visa is also working on the initiative with IBM, online payment company Stripe, and phone-maker Samsung.
Pilot projects began on Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year.
The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what now feels like a futuristic concept could soon become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks.
It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles, an essential step before offering the product to consumers.
For emerging AI companies, Visa's backing could also boost their chances of competing with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are developing their own AI agents.
“We think this could be really important,” Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, said in an interview. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”
The limitations of agentic AI
The tech industry is already showing what it can do with so-called "agentic" AI, though many uses still exist in an experimental form — not yet available to the public.
Most are still refashioned versions of large language models — the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarise documents or help people code. Trained on huge troves of data, they can scour the internet and bring back recommendations for things to buy, but they have a harder time going beyond that.
“The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a really good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments,” Forestell said. “You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, ‘OK, you go buy it.’"
Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases.
“The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. “That’s why we started working with them.”
Digital payments
The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the US, making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant.
Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay that turn their phones into a credit card. A similar process of vetting someone's digital credentials would authorise AI agents to work on a customer's behalf, in a way Forestell says must assure buyers, banks and merchants that the transactions are legitimate and that Visa will handle disputes.
Forestell said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people — like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists — or are too complicated, like travel bookings.
In those situations, some people might want an agent that “just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us,” Forestell said.
Other shopping experiences, such as for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons, Forestell said. In that case, he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background.
Spending limits
And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit $1.21 trillion (€1.1tn) at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York.
Forestell says consumers will give their AI agents clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human is still in control. At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to make sure they are OK with a specific airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might get more autonomy to “go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said.
Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases.
“Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,” Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer, said.
“When we generate a recommendation — say you’re asking, ‘What are the best laptops?’ — we would know what are other transactions you’ve made and the revealed preferences from that.”
Perplexity's chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it's still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko explained.
The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google's internet browser, Chrome, if the US forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case.
