AI shopping is moving from “What should I buy?” to “Should I let the bot buy it for me?”
Visa and OpenAI are working to bring payment capabilities to ChatGPT agents, a move that could enable AI systems to search, recommend, and eventually complete purchases with less direct user input. The effort points to a broader race to make AI agents useful not just for answering questions, but for handling transactions.
"As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure, and seamless,” Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said in a press release.
Several questions follow the announcement, ranging from susceptibility to fraud and financial data privacy to possible charges that users and merchants must pay. While some have answers, others remain unanswered.
From recommendations to autonomous transactions
The AI industry has spent the past few years proving that large language models (LLMs) can create media, generate code, summarize documents, and answer some very complex questions. The next challenge could be whether they can reliably handle commerce, and if consumers will trust those same systems to make purchases.
The shift may seem incremental, but according to Visa’s Global Head of Growth, Rubail Birwadker, integrations like this will “allow OpenAI, and then over time other platforms, to build better experiences.”
Already, Amazon does something like this through Alexa for Shopping, a shopping agent integrated inside the Amazon ecosystem. Amazon says the agent can offer in-depth recommendations, track product prices, and place orders using users’ linked cards.
A bigger battle for the future of online shopping
The announcement is part of a wider industry effort to make AI agents “play an increasingly important role in helping people complete tasks that involve money,” according to OpenAI’s Head of Partnerships and Commerce, Marco Mahrus.
For Visa, the opportunity lies in becoming the payments layer for those AI-powered experiences. OpenAI is a leading AI platform, and if the company's users begin relying on its agents to handle shopping and other routine tasks, Visa could become a central player in a new digital economy driven by autonomous software.
The strategy is already attracting competition. According to AOL, Mastercard has also launched a similar offering, suggesting that the race to power AI commerce is only beginning.
Questions yet unanswered
While Visa and OpenAI have outlined parts of the AI shopping experience, some details remain unclear. The companies have yet to explain exactly how disputes will be handled when an AI agent makes an incorrect purchase or acts on misunderstood instructions.
Privacy is another area likely to attract scrutiny, and a potentially big one at that. The more responsibility users hand over to AI systems, the more data those systems may need to access, including spending habits, preferences, and purchase histories.
Questions also remain about costs and merchant participation. Last year, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout, but the feature was largely unsuccessful due to the charge merchants had to pay for it, and it was withdrawn in March.
The partnership’s success will likely depend on how clearly Visa and OpenAI answer questions about fees, disputes, privacy, and user control.
Also read: World’s AgentKit aims to verify humans behind AI shopping agents and reduce fraud in automated commerce.