Payments giant Visa announced Wednesday it has embedded its payment network inside of ChatGPT so that the chatbot can independently shop and complete transactions. This means that AI agents can not only recommend products but also complete the purchase on the user’s behalf at potentially any merchant that accepts Visa.
This isn’t OpenAI’s first attempt at e-commerce. Previously, the company had introduced Instant Checkout, which had built upon previously available shopping features on the platform, that brought forth relevant products, images, reviews and prices in response to shopping-related questions.
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The feature allowed users to just tap “Buy” to confirm their order, shipping, and payment details without leaving the conversation. However, this feature was prone to errors and was not widely adopted by merchants due to the fee that OpenAI was charging merchants, so it was retired in March.
According to AP, Visa’s collaboration is different from the ChatGPT-maker’s previous attempts. It will allow users to link their Visa cards to ChatGPT to shop and make it easier for merchants to accept transactions initiated by agents.
OpenAI will provide the technology to allow agents to interact, make decisions and initiate purchases through ChatGPT, while Visa will provide the payment authorization and fraud monitoring needed to do this at scale.
“As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless,” said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa.
In a company event on Friday, Forstell gave an example of a customer telling ChatGPT they’re looking for a pair of wireless headphones under $150. The chatbot would find a pair for sale under those parameters and buy it on behalf of the customer.
“I think we’re generally at a place where most people are very comfortable with the shopping aspects of it and have discovered this as a superior discovery experience,” Forestell said in an interview. But, he added, making the leap from having AI agents recommend what to buy to doing the purchasing “just requires a whole different level of trust.”
“But that all comes from the underlying infrastructure, the process, the security that we build into it and the rules,” he said.
Visa also said that the feature will have guardrails like spending limits, required approval steps and approved merchants for shopping in order to protect consumers and minimize fraud.
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Forestell said Visa will handle disputes with the same essential rules it uses for any other transaction: Did the consumer really intend to make the purchase and did the merchant process it the correct way? Where it might change, he added, is if both the consumer intent and the merchant processing were done the right way, but “something happened in the middle that caused a problem.”
“And that’s why we’re modifying our whole token framework and data capture process with Visa Intelligent Commerce to make sure that problem doesn’t happen,” Forestell said.
Visa and OpenAI did not reveal the financial terms of the collaboration or details on the fees merchants or customers would have to pay.