Visa wants to give artificial intelligence ‘agents’ your credit card

By MATT O BRIEN Artificial intelligence agents are supposed to be more than chatbots The tech industry has spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf Related Articles The home of Elon Musk s SpaceX could become an official Texas city called Starbase Apprentice loan default collections resume what to know Tariff turmoil prompts cloudy forecasts from companies for the year ahead Europe saw stronger rise at start of year but Trump s tariffs have darkened outlook Trump says US kids may get dolls instead of but China will suffer more in a commerce war So far they re not doing much Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card Set a budget and a few preferences and these AI agents successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers could find and buy you a sweater weekly groceries or an airplane ticket We think this could be really pivotal declared 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 Visa released Wednesday it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers among them U S companies Anthropic Microsoft OpenAI and Perplexity and France s Mistral to connect their AI systems to Visa s payments setup Visa is also working with IBM online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative Pilot projects begin Wednesday ahead of more widespread usage expected next year The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our the majority mundane shopping tasks in the near future It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it 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 advancing their own AI agents The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what it calls agentic AI though sparse are yet detected in the real world Largest part are still refashioned versions of large language models the generative AI system behind chatbots that can write emails summarize documents or help people code Trained on huge troves of content 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 challenge but they are having tremendous trouble on payments Forestell revealed 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 issue is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves Forestell mentioned That s why we started working with them The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the U S making physical cards and their -digit numbers increasingly irrelevant A large number of 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 authorize 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 reported that doesn t mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience but it might be useful for errands that either bore certain people like groceries home improvement items or even Christmas lists or are too complicated like expedition bookings In those situations specific people might want an agent that just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us Forestell reported Other shopping experiences such as for luxury goods are a form of entertainment and plenty of customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons Forestell mentioned In that scenario he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background And what about credit card debt The credit card balances of American consumers hit trillion 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 on any airline to get me from A to B he mentioned Part of what is attracting several AI developers to the Visa partnership is that with a customer s consent an AI agent can also tap into a lot of information about past credit card purchases Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us reported 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 Perplexity s chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases but it s still in the early stages of AI commerce Shevelenko says The San Francisco startup has also along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI notified a federal court it would consider buying Google s internet browser Chrome if the U S forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust occurrence