Visa announced on Wednesday that it would be partnering with leading tech companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France’s Mistral — to connect their AI systems to Visa’s payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative.
With this development, consumers would be able to use AI agents that shop and make purchases on their behalf, based on preselected preferences. “We think this could be really important,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”
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Forestell also said that this doesn’t mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience. Rather, 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, adding that other shopping experiences, like shopping for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons. In such cases, he envisions AI agents offering assistance while staying in the background.
Addressing concerns about credit card debt, Forestell said 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.
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AI developers are also attracted to this partnership because it allows AI agents to tap into consumers’ previous credit card purchases, with their consent. “Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer. “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.”