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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.
So far, they’re not doing much.
Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some 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 important,” says 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 announced 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 network. 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.
