Artificial intelligence 鈥渁gents鈥 are supposed to be more than chatbots. The tech industry spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf.
So far, they鈥檙e not doing much.
Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents 鈥 successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers 鈥 could find and buy you a sweater, weekly groceries or an airplane ticket.
鈥淲e think this could be really important,鈥 said Jack Forestell, Visa鈥檚 chief product and strategy officer. 鈥淭ransformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.鈥
Visa announced last week it partnered with a group of leading AI chatbot developers 鈥 among them U.S. companies Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France鈥檚 Mistral 鈥 to connect their AI systems to Visa鈥檚 payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative. Pilot projects began Wednesday ahead of more widespread usage expected next year.
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The San Francisco payment processing company thinks what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer will use it.
For emerging AI companies, Visa鈥檚 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.
The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what it calls agentic AI, though few are yet found in the real world. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models 鈥 the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarize 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.
鈥淭he 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,鈥 Forestell said. 鈥淵ou get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, 鈥極K, you go buy it.鈥欌
Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases.
鈥淭he payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves,鈥 Forestell said. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 why we started working with them.鈥
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 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鈥檚 digital credentials would authorize AI agents to work on a customer鈥檚 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鈥檛 mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people 鈥 like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists 鈥 or are too complicated, like travel bookings. In those situations, some people might want an agent that 鈥渏ust powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us,鈥 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.
And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit $1.21 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 鈥済o spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B,鈥 he said.
Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer鈥檚 consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases.
鈥淰isa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,鈥 said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity鈥檚 chief business officer. 鈥淲hen we generate a recommendation 鈥 say you鈥檙e asking, 鈥榃hat are the best laptops?鈥 鈥 we would know what are other transactions you鈥檝e made and the revealed preferences from that.鈥
Perplexity鈥檚 chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it鈥檚 still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko says. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google鈥檚 internet browser, Chrome, if the U.S. forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case.
