Visa and Mastercard Unveil AI-Powered Shopping, Revolutionizing E-Commerce

Visa and Mastercard unveil AI-powered shopping | TechCrunch

Artificial intelligence is not just infiltrating the startup world. Now, credit card giants Visa and Mastercard are getting into the AI game. Visa announced on Wednesday "Intelligent Commerce," which it says enables AI "to find and buy." AI agents will be able to shop and make purchases on behalf of consumers, based on preselected preferences. In a statement, Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said: "Each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest." Visa says that it is collaborating with a mix of tech giants and startups to develop AI-powered shopping experiences that are "more personal, more secure, and more convenient." Those companies include Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, and Stripe, among others. The move follows Mastercard's announcement on Tuesday that it would give AI agents the ability to shop online for consumers. Mastercard said its new Agent Pay offering "will enhance generative AI conversations for people and businesses alike" by integrating payments into tailored recommendations and insights already provided on conversational platforms. In a statement, it said: "This means that for a soon-to-be-30-year-old planning her milestone birthday party, she can now chat with an AI agent to proactively curate a selection of outfits and accessories from local boutiques and online retailers based on her style, the venue's ambience, and weather forecasts. Based on her preferences and feedback, the intelligent agent can make the purchase, and also recommend the best way to pay, for example, using Mastercard One Credential." Mastercard said it will work with Microsoft on new use cases to scale "agentic commerce," as well as with IBM, Braintree, and Checkout.com on other aspects of AI-powered shopping. Visa and Mastercard aren't the only ones allowing for AI-powered shopping. Earlier this month, Amazon announced the start of testing of a new AI shopping agent, a feature it calls "Buy for Me," with a subset of users.OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have also showcased similar agents that can visit websites and help users make purchases. OpenAI said Monday that it was updating ChatGPT search, its web search tool in ChatGPT, to give users an improved online shopping experience.

Visa preps AI-ready credit cards for automated shopping transactions

Imagine AI agents finding and ordering products for you. With today's Visa announcement, that future just got a little closer. AI has transformed everyday tasks such as writing, coding -- even shopping. Now, Visa is introducing an initiative to prepare its payment network for a new era of agentic AI shopping experiences. On Wednesday, the company unveiled Visa Intelligent Commerce at the Visa Global Product Drop. According to the release, this initiative opens Visa's payment network to developers and engineers who are building agentic AI shopping experiences that find and buy products for users. Also: ChatGPT is your personal shopper now Moreover, Visa Intelligent Commerce is a commercial partner program for AI platforms that includes a suite of integrated APIs developers can use to deploy Visa's AI commerce capabilities. According to Visa, the program offers AI-ready credit cards that replace card details with tokenized digital credentials; AI-powered personalization, which (with user consent) shares basic Visa spend and purchase insights to improve Agent performance; and AI payments, which let AI agents make transactions with clear guidelines set by the user. Visa's chief product and strategy officer, Jack Forestell, compared this wave of transformation to the transition from physical shopping to online, and then online to mobile, with AI setting a new standard for commerce. "Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase, and manage on their behalf," said Forestell. "These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well." To bring this initiative to life, Visa will collaborate with many AI industry leaders, including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, Stripe, and more. People increasingly rely on AI to shop for them, finding exactly what they want in less time and more efficiently. For example, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have implemented AI-powered shopping features within their chatbots to help users find what they need conversationally. Also: How an 'internet of agents' could help AIs connect and work together Visa's initiative is taking this one step further by removing friction at the payment stage in this AI-driven commerce era, helping merchants and consumers enjoy a more seamless and secure personalized experience. Other payment networks have introduced similar initiatives. Yesterday, Mastercard announced Mastercard Agent Pay, its agent-based AI payment program. This program is also meant to deliver more secure and personalized payment experiences in the age of AI. According to the company, the program introduces Mastercard Agentic Tokens and a partnership with Microsoft to develop new use cases and "scale agentic commerce."

Visa CEO Says AI Shopping to Push Advertising, Payments to Adapt

Visa Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ryan McInerney said advertising will be forced to evolve as shoppers turn to artificial intelligence agents to help them browse products and make purchases. The payments company is enabling AI agents to do just that -- cutting down the time and energy consumers spend on finding and paying for the ideal item or service online, Visa said in a statement Wednesday. It's collaborating with Anthropic PBC, Microsoft Corp., OpenAI Inc. and other AI firms on the product launch.

Visa partners with AI giants to streamline online shopping

April 30 (Reuters) - Visa (V.N), opens new tab is partnering with tech heavyweights, including Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab and OpenAI, to roll out a new platform that lets users delegate their online shopping tasks to AI agents. While users will set spending limits, the AI agents will do the rest -- searching for products, booking vacations or ordering groceries, the payments processor said on Wednesday. WHY IT'S IMPORTANT Digital commerce companies often try to shorten the time between consumers selecting a product and making a payment to prevent them from abandoning their purchases midway. Shorter checkout times have become even more crucial since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many users shifted to online shopping. A 2020 report, opens new tab by Experian found that one in three customers were only willing to wait 30 seconds or less before abandoning an online transaction. Visa's new platform, Visa Intelligent Commerce, could help reduce friction by letting AI handle routine tasks while customers only make the final call. The smoother shopping experience could encourage more spending. CONTEXT AI agents are systems that can act autonomously to perform certain tasks. Unlike chatbots, agents do not require constant human input. They are expected to become a bigger part of businesses' AI plans in the future. An analysis by Boston Consulting Group projects the market could grow at an average annual rate of 45% from 2024 to 2030. Besides Microsoft and OpenAI, Visa is also collaborating with Anthropic, IBM (IBM.N), opens new tab, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Samsung and Stripe. Reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence Niket Nishant Thomson Reuters Niket Nishant reports on breaking news and the quarterly earnings of Wall Street's largest banks, card companies, financial technology upstarts and asset managers. He also covers the biggest IPOs on U.S. exchanges, and late-stage venture capital funding alongside news and regulatory developments in the cryptocurrency industry. His writing appears on the finance, business, markets and future of money sections of the website. He did his post-graduation from the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media (IIJNM) in Bengaluru.

Visa wants to give artificial intelligence 'agents' your credit card

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," 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." 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. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most 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 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 -- 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. "The 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," Forestell said. "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 problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. "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 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant. Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apply 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 said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but 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. 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 "go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. "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." 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, told 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 case.

Robot shoppers? Visa's new AI could soon swipe your card and maybe your sanity

US scientists debut atomic clock that stays true for 100 million years straight With artificial intelligence slowly leaving its footprint across all industries, credit card giant Visa is already taking steps towards embracing this revolution. On Wednesday, the American credit card giant announced partnerships with leading AI chatbot developers -- Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, IBM, and many more -- for integrating AI systems into their payment network. The pilot project for testing usage will begin on Wednesday, with frequent usage amongst consumers likely to start from next year.

No more window switching: Mastercard's Agent Pay transforms how enterprises use AI search

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More One criticism of computer use platforms and other search agents is that you cannot complete any transactions within the same window if you use them to find a product or a hotel. Mastercard aims to change that by integrating AI companies and platforms into its payments network, enabling users and enterprises to transact seamlessly within their respective ecosystems. Today the company announced Agent Pay, a new payments program that brings the Mastercard payments system to AI chat platforms. Greg Ulrich, Mastercard's chief data and AI officer, told VentureBeat in an interview that Agent Pay "closes the loop" on agentic search. "You want to close the loop within the experience to enable the customer experience in the most effective way possible, which is what we're trying to enable today," Ulrich said. "You have to make sure that everybody in the ecosystem can identify the agents and authenticate the agent to handle the transaction safely and securely." OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity can join Mastercard's payments network, allowing other network participants -- merchants, card users and financial institutions -- to trust the platform's transactions and check for any potential fraud. It also enables Mastercard to bring its fraud and transaction dispute systems to those companies. Mastercard partnered with Microsoft, IBM, Braintree, and Checkout.com to scale Agent Pay, orchestrate the system and enhance other features for merchants. It will also integrate Agent Pay with banks and other financial institutions. This week, OpenAI even announced it's adding shopping features to ChatGPT search, running on GPT-4o, in a bid to compete with Google's long-standing dominance in product search. However, users have always found that they need to open a separate window if they see a deal. "We're gonna work with the AI platform and agents so that they can get onboarded and can access the technology. But on the merchant side, they can do now things to recognize these transactions and more effectively manage the risk around this," said Mastercard Chief Digital Officer Pablo Fourez. Bringing these platforms into a payments system like Mastercard makes them more useful, as they can serve not only as a place where people find information, but also as a platform where users can find and transact. When AI companies are part of the payment network, it could also improve any agentic workflow built by enterprises. Imagine an agentic workflow that includes searching for new suppliers, finding a suitable supplier, helping with negotiations, drafting a contract and setting up transactions through the platform. The company is discussing the integration of Agent Pay into Microsoft's Copilot and Azure/OpenAI services. Tokens rather than AI Agent Pay, however, is not based on generative AI, even though Mastercard does leverage the technology for other products. Agent Pay relies on the company's tokenization technology, which utilizes cryptography to help mask personally identifiable information (PII) during digital transactions. "It's a separate number that is useless if it's not used within the context of the transaction that you authorized," Fourez said. "That's achieved through cryptography that makes the transactions each transaction unique, and if someone else gets this information, they can't do anything with it." Mastercard utilizes generative AI and large language models for fraud detection, which Ulrich noted works in tandem with tokenization for Agent Pay, as its AI models verify transactions for fraud once they are initiated. Ulrich added Agent Pay lets every company and person involved in the transaction trust that "rules work in this ecosystem." "We're making sure that we safely and securely identify these players in the ecosystem, that we have a way to capture and hold the credentials securely," he said.

OpenAI and Visa prep for AI-powered shopping

Why it matters: Shopping has fueled every internet boom from the dot-com to mobile to social. Driving the news: Visa on Wednesday announced a push to embed its payment network into AI systems, including chatbots and agents. How it works: Visa demoed the ability to enter a credit or debit card into a chatbot once, allowing AI agents to use that payment mechanism -- with user consent -- to purchase a range of goods and services through natural conversation. Separately, OpenAI said Monday that it is adding direct product links to ChatGPT search starting with categories including fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics. Between the lines: The biggest hurdle to so-called conversational commerce isn't technological. It's trust. Reality check: Widespread use remains uncertain, even for early adopters. The intrigue: Chatbots will reshape shopping. And shopping will reshape chatbots. What they're saying: An OpenAI representative said that the company does not have affiliate links nor does it receive revenue from purchases made through ChatGPT search, nor does it have current plans to do so. What's next: Experts say retailers need to start rethinking their e-commerce strategy to prepare for chatbots to play a significant role.

Visa wants to give artificial intelligence 'agents' your credit card

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," 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." 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. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most 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 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 -- 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. "The 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," Forestell said. "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 problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. "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 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'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 said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but 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. 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 "go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. "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." 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, told 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 case. © 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Visa wants to give artificial intelligence 'agents' your credit card

Visa is collaborating with AI firms like Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI so that consumers will be able to outsource spending to AI agents. Visa announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers to connect their systems to Visa's payments network. The aim is to outsource personal budgeting jobs to AI bots. Users will be able to set preferences and spending limits, then the AI agents will search for products and complete purchases. Partner companies include US firms Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France's Mistral. Visa is also working on the initiative with IBM, online payment company Stripe, and phone-maker Samsung. Pilot projects began on Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what now feels like a futuristic concept could soon become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles, an essential step before offering the product to consumers. 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 developing their own AI agents. "We think this could be really important," Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer, said in an interview. "Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself." The tech industry is already showing what it can do with so-called "agentic" AI, though many uses still exist in an experimental form -- not yet available to the public. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models -- the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarise 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. "The 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," Forestell said. "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 problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. "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 US, 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's digital credentials would authorise 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 said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but 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. 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 (€1.1tn) 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 $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. "Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us," Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer, said. "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 explained. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google's internet browser, Chrome, if the US forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case.

Visa's new tech lets AI shop -- and pay -- for you

Are you ready to hand over your wallet to AI and let it do your shopping for you? Maybe not -- but the technology to do it is hitting the market. On Wednesday, Visa announced Visa Intelligent Commerce, which effectively allows AI agents to find and buy goods or services on behalf of consumers. While Visa itself doesn't create the AI agents, what it's done is create the e-commerce backbone to allow it to happen. Consumers could use AI tools to track down potential purchases, but then those platforms would hand control back over to the human to complete the transaction. The big change with Visa's technology is that, with the proper permissions enabled, AI agents can complete the purchase without going back to their human handler. The value-add, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell tells Fast Company, is that it "frees up the cognitive load and time, delivering massively better outcomes, and more value -- it's going to deliver better shopping experiences." For example, a shopper can now request that an AI agent buy a bouquet for their mom as a Mother's Day gift, and the entire process requires little, if any additional input from the shopper. The AI may be able to find the particular flowers the consumer's mother likes, at a desired price point, and have them delivered on or before Mother's Day. The shopper can breathe easy, and not put too much thought or effort into the transaction -- something that their mother's probably wouldn't want to know.

Visa wants to give artificial intelligence 'agents' your credit card

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," 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." 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. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most 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 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 -- 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. "The 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," Forestell said. "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 problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. "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 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant. Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apply 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 said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but 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. 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 "go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. "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." 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, told 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 case.

Visa wants to give artificial intelligence 'agents' your credit card

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," 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." 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. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most 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 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 -- 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. "The 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," Forestell said. "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 problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. "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 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'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 said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but 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. 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 "go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. "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." 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, told 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 case.

Visa Wants to Give Artificial Intelligence 'Agents' Your Credit Card

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," 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." 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. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most 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 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 -- 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. "The 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," Forestell said. "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 problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. "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 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant. Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apply 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 said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but 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. 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 "go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. "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." 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, told 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 case. Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Visa Wants to Give Your Credit Card to AI 'Agents'

Featured Video The Man Behind the Wheel of Driverless Trucks 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. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most 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 developing their own AI agents.

Mastercard and PayPal make agentic commerce plays

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. The payments giant is working with Microsoft to integrate AI technologies, including Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Copilot Studio, with its own technology to develop so-called 'agentic commerce'. This, says Mastercard, will lead to smarter and more personal payment experiences for consumers, merchants and issuers. Payments will be integrated into the tailored recommendations provided by generative AI conversation. For example, someone planning a birthday party can chat with an AI agent to proactively curate a selection of outfits and accessories from local boutiques and online retailers based on their style, the venue's ambience, and weather forecasts. Based on her preferences and feedback, the agent can make the purchase, and also recommend the best way to pay. Or, a small textile enterprise will be able to use their AI agent to handle sourcing, optimise payment terms and manage logistics with an international supplier. From there, the AI agent can complete the cross-border purchase using a Mastercard virtual corporate card token and arrange for cost-effective, expedited delivery. AI agents will need to be registered and verified before making payments on behalf of users and enhanced tokenisation technology will be used for payments initiated through conversational interfaces. In addition to working with Microsoft, Mastercard is partnering IBM on B2B use cases and acquirers and checkout players like Braintree and Chekout.com on tokenisation. Jorn Lambert, chief product officer, Mastercard, says: "The launch of Mastercard Agent Pay marks our initial steps in redefining commerce in the AI era, including new merchant interfaces to distinguish trusted agents from bad actors using agentic technology. Meanwhile, PayPal says developers can now enable agentic AI experiences that allow customers to pay, track shipments, manage invoices, and more, all powered by PayPal and within an AI agent. Alex Chriss, president and CEO, PayPal, says: "We are building with velocity and partnering with the biggest players in AI to empower our customers to access new opportunities in the AI economy." OpenAI is also jumping on the train, rolling out features that make it easier and faster to find, compare and buy products in its ChatGPT chatbot.

Visa partners with AI giants to streamline online shopping

While users will set spending limits, the AI agents will do the rest - searching for products, booking vacations or ordering groceries, the payments processor said on Wednesday.Visa is partnering with tech heavyweights, including Microsoft and OpenAI, to roll out a new platform that lets users delegate their online shopping tasks to AI agents. While users will set spending limits, the AI agents will do the rest - searching for products, booking vacations or ordering groceries, the payments processor said on Wednesday. Digital commerce companies often try to shorten the time between consumers selecting a product and making a payment to prevent them from abandoning their purchases midway. Shorter checkout times have become even more crucial since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many users shifted to online shopping. A 2020 report by Experian found that one in three customers were only willing to wait 30 seconds or less before abandoning an online transaction. Visa's new platform, Visa Intelligent Commerce, could help reduce friction by letting AI handle routine tasks while customers only make the final call. The smoother shopping experience could encourage more spending. AI agents are systems that can act autonomously to perform certain tasks. Unlike chatbots, agents do not require constant human input. They are expected to become a bigger part of businesses' AI plans in the future. An analysis by Boston Consulting Group projects the market could grow at an average annual rate of 45% from 2024 to 2030. Besides Microsoft and OpenAI, Visa is also collaborating with Anthropic, IBM, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Samsung and Stripe.

Visa unveils agentic commerce and stablecoin plays

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. At its global product drop this week, the firm has launched Visa Intelligent Commerce, its technology for enabling AI to find and buy. The likes of Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, Stripe have all been signed up as partners. Visa chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell says: "Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf. These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well. "Just like the shift from physical shopping to online, and from online to mobile, Visa is setting a new standard for a new era of commerce. Now, with Visa Intelligent Commerce, AI agents can find, shop and buy for consumers based on their pre-selected preferences. Each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest." The new offering includes AI-ready cards that replace card details with tokenised digital credentials; AI-powered personalisation that is based on spending data that the shopper agrees to share; and AI payments where shoppers set spending limits and conditions for the agents. Visa's announcement comes in the same week that Mastercard and PayPal unveiled their plans for agentic commerce, as the big payments players gear up for what they expect to be one of the biggest growth opportunities of the next few years. Also at the product drop, Visa has revealed a partnership with Stripe-owned Bridge to help bring stablecoin-linked cards to more people in more places. The new issuing product will help fintech developers using Bridge offer stablecoin-linked Visa cards to their end customers in multiple countries through a single API integration. These cardholders will then be able to make everyday purchases from a stablecoin balance at any merchant location that accepts Visa. Says Forestell: "We're focused on integrating stablecoins into Visa's existing network and products in a frictionless and secure way. Partnering with Bridge represents a significant move in helping to make stablecoins usable in everyday life, giving consumers more choice in how they manage and spend their money."

Mastercard Debuts Agent Pay to Promote 'Agentic Commerce Future' | PYMNTS.com

Mastercard has launched Agent Pay, its agentic artificial intelligence (AI)-driven payments program. The new offering, announced Tuesday (April 29), introduces Mastercard's Agentic Tokens, which the company said builds upon tokenization capabilities that power global commerce solutions like mobile contactless payments, along with programmable payments such as recurring expenses and subscriptions. "This helps unlock an agentic commerce future where consumers and businesses can transact with trust, security, and control," the company said in a news release. "Mastercard Agent Pay will enhance generative AI conversations for people and businesses alike by integrating trusted, seamless payments experiences into the tailored recommendations and insights already provided on conversational platforms." That means, the company said, that someone planning a party could chat with an AI agent to curate outfits and accessories or plan a venue. The agent can then make purchases based on that customer's preferences and feedback, while also recommending the best way to pay. According to the release, Mastercard plans to collaborate with a number of tech companies on the program: Microsoft on new use cases to scale agentic commerce, IBM to accelerate B2B use cases and companies like Braintree and Checkout.com to enhance tokenization capabilities already in use. "The launch of Mastercard Agent Pay marks our initial steps in redefining commerce in the AI era, including new merchant interfaces to distinguish trusted agents from bad actors using agentic technology," said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard's chief product officer. "Recognizing the seismic implications of this evolution, we are keen to collaborate with industry players to advance the standards for agentic payments, such as applying the Model Context Protocol to Secure Remote Commerce," he added. "This lays the foundation for scale and builds trust in agentic commerce." In other agentic AI news, PYMNTS explored the technology's use in things like loan underwriting, fraud detection and cross-border payments in a recent interview with TerraPay Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Ram Sundaram. He noted that while automated decision making and streamlined processes will continue to transform global money movement, there's still a need for have some human interaction. "Obviously, in the best-case scenario, everything goes smoothly, but when things are not going smoothly, that's when the customer queries come in," Sundaram said. It's not always easy to immediately determine where a transaction is, as company analysts and representatives have to examine logs and query partner systems. "A lot of that work is done manually," Sundaram said, adding that the agents "know the corridors and the markets that they are working in, but it still takes some time."

Visa Powers AI Shopping Agents With 'Intelligent Commerce' Payment Rails | PYMNTS.com

Visa Intelligent Commerce is designed to transform online shopping by creating a seamless, personalized and frictionless experience that moves from search and discovery directly to purchase. Visa wants the next wave of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) to do more than curate a dream vacation or the perfect outfit to wear for it. It wants it to pick up the tab. Unveiled Wednesday (April 30) at the company's Global Product Drop, the Visa Intelligent Commerce program opens the network's rails to developers building AI agents that search, recommend and now pay on behalf of consumers. The stakes are considerable. Generative AI (GenAI) platforms are influencing what people buy. The missing link is a payment mechanism that is both invisible to consumers and accepted, quite literally, by merchants. "This is going to transform shopping and buying -- we're letting AI developers and engineers use the Visa network to allow AI agents to find, and buy, on [the consumer's] behalf in a seamless and safe way," Mark Nelsen, Visa's global head of consumer products, told PYMNTS' Karen Webster on the eve of the announcement. At the center of the effort is an AI-ready card, a credential developers can spin up through a bundle of Visa application programming interfaces (APIs). As Nelsen put it: "The APIs will have an AI-ready card. In a hypothetical search for the cheapest flight to Cancún, for example, a traveler uploads an existing Visa credential, while in the background Visa authenticates the cardholder with payment passkeys, tokenizes the 16-digit number and seats the token inside the AI agent." That behind-the-scenes swap shields account data, eliminating the clunky step of keying in card numbers every time the agent hops to a new site. It also takes card-on-file commerce to an entirely new, contextually powered ecosystem, allowing consumers to leave their physical and digital wallets at home. Nelsen walked through an inventory of five modules that developers can cherry-pick or adopt wholesale. Modules, he said, are built on three decades of Visa's work in using AI to fight fraud. Visa says its AI engines blocked roughly $40 billion in fraud last year. Visa Intelligent Commerce imports the same models into agent-driven transactions. Nelsen emphasized that, together, the tools aim to make AI-powered buying as routine and secure as tapping a phone at checkout. But here's where it can get interesting and where AI agents and AI cards can simplify the complexity of shopping. GenAI chatbots can already present a short list of hiking boots or boutique hotels. What they can't yet do is close the sale without punting the consumer to a checkout page. Or in the case of a complex search that asks for the most stylish hiking boots for the summer trip to Cinque Terre, and what restaurants are best to watch the sunset, there are multiple searches, steps and a big gap from information and intent to purchase. That gap, Nelsen argued, is where cart abandonment and lost revenue lurk. "We ask the consumer ... whether they would like to share information around their spend behavior with the agent so that it knows their preferences, such as the airline you prefer and the typical amount of money that you spend on hotels. 'Where do you like to go for dinner?'" he said. "That's personalization." Once a shopper sets, for instance, a $500 ceiling for a hotel or an airline ticket, the AI agent scours sites, picks seats or rooms and pays, constrained by the limits embedded in the token created by the AI card. "[Visa] verifies your instruction," Nelsen said, "and loads that instruction into VisaNet, and the agent will work on their behalf. ... If everything matches, we'll send the transaction to the issuing bank to be approved." Nelsen said that a consumer has all the security, control and protections in place that come with using their Visa card, even though it is the AI agent that is "making" the transaction. The same tokenization that reassures consumers also signals to merchants that the purchase request is legitimate, not a bot fraudster. Users can require the AI agent to ping them for approval above a certain spend, or to pause before purchasing from unfamiliar sellers. Unlike fledgling AI startups, Visa doesn't have to lay new rails. Its tokenization framework already covers more than 200 countries and territories, and the Intelligent Commerce APIs are live now for partners ranging from Anthropic and OpenAI to Microsoft, Samsung and Stripe. "Any Visa credential can work," Nelsen said, because the underlying technology has been field-tested for years. That global footprint means an AI agent could book a table at an impossible-to-get-into Manhattan restaurant -- or a last-minute villa on Italy's Lake Como -- without exposing card data or tripping fraud filters. Merchants, bruised by fraud losses and rising customer-acquisition costs, want conversions. Consumer want friction-free checkout. And regulators want proof that AI won't introduce new risk. Visa's bet is that sliding its fraud models and dispute-resolution tools under the hood will let all three constituencies adopt AI commerce faster. "It's not only safe for the consumers," Nelsen said. "It's safe for the whole ecosystem, for the banks and the merchants as well. We're excited about what the program will enable." And, he added, "search used to be simple, and then it got complicated -- now we can make it personalized and simple at the same time." Visa isn't predicting how quickly consumers will surrender purchase decisions to software agents, but it is positioning itself as the payments backbone when they do. By turning card numbers into tokens, layering on spend controls and piping in real-time fraud defenses, Intelligent Commerce tries to ensure the AI agent economy is born with same adult-grade security that exists in the digital and mobile ecosystems today.

Mastercard introduces Agent Pay, a novel agentic payments technology By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Mastercard (NYSE:MA) has unveiled its Agentic Payments Program, Mastercard Agent Pay, which integrates with agentic AI to revolutionize commerce. The new program aims to provide smarter, more secure, and personalized payment experiences to consumers, merchants, and issuers. Mastercard Agent Pay introduces Mastercard Agentic Tokens, enhancing the existing tokenization capabilities that currently support global commerce solutions such as mobile contactless payments, secure card-on-file, and Mastercard Payment Passkeys. This development is set to facilitate an agentic commerce future where transactions can be carried out with trust, security, and control. Mastercard plans to collaborate with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and other leading AI platforms to scale agentic commerce. Partnerships with technology enablers like IBM (NYSE:IBM), with its watsonx Orchestrate product, will be leveraged to expedite B2B use cases. In addition, Mastercard will work with acquirers and checkout players like Braintree and Checkout.com to improve the tokenization capabilities already in use today with merchants to deliver safe, transparent agentic payments. For banks, tokenized payment credentials will be smoothly integrated across agentic commerce platforms, keeping card issuers at the forefront of this rapidly evolving technology with enhanced visibility, security, and control. Mastercard Agent Pay will enhance AI conversations for people and businesses alike by integrating trusted, seamless payments experiences into the recommendations and insights already provided on conversational platforms. This will allow consumers and businesses to transact with trust, security, and control. Mastercard will work with Microsoft to integrate Microsoft's leading AI technologies, including Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Copilot Studio, with Mastercard's trusted payment solutions to develop and scale agentic commerce. Mastercard Agent Pay will ensure that payments made within AI platforms are safe and transparent at every stage of the transaction - before, during and after. The program will require trusted AI agents to be registered and verified, after which they will be able to make secure payments on behalf of their users. Enhanced tokenization technology will enable payments to be initiated through conversational interfaces and conducted at millions of merchants of all sizes supporting online commerce today. Consumers will have complete control over what the agent is allowed to purchase on their behalf, ensuring that the payments they make are securely authorized and identified. Mastercard's best-in-class cyber, security, and authentication capabilities will protect merchants and consumers against bad actors from end-to-end. This will include the use of AI agents to facilitate strong consumer authentication leveraging on-device biometrics and a process to help clarify agentic transactions that may be unfamiliar or unrecognized. "Mastercard is transforming the way the world pays for the better by anticipating consumer needs on the horizon," said Jorn Lambert, chief product officer at Mastercard. "The launch of Mastercard Agent Pay marks our initial steps in redefining commerce in the AI era." As agentic commerce evolves, Mastercard is committed to ongoing, responsible innovation in this space - enabling use cases today and keeping an eye on the vision for tomorrow.

The Future is Here: Visa Announces New Era of Commerce Featuring AI

Global leader brings its trusted brand and powerful network to enable payments with new technologies Launches new innovations and partnerships to drive flexibility, security and acceptance The future of commerce is on display at the Visa Global Product Drop with powerful AI-enabled advancements allowing consumers to find and buy with AI plus the introduction of new strategic partnerships and product innovations. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250430574512/en/ "As new ways to pay emerge, they need to run on a network that is always on - that is safe, secure, scalable and relentlessly innovating," said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney. "We are taking the power of our network and our decades-long expertise to bring new products and solutions that will transform commerce and bring trust and security to AI-enabled payments." Product Roadmap Visa kicked off its Global Product Drop by sharing how the combination of AI and digital commerce will mark a significant shift in the way consumers discover and buy products and services. In the near future, consumers will enable AI agents to browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf. For this to be possible, agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well. Visa will bring this trust to AI commerce by providing a simple way for our partners - AI platforms, tech players, banks, fintechs, merchants and more - to access the Visa network. This is the next step in Visa's journey to connect even more buyers and sellers through seamless, secure digital payments. Headlining the announcement, the company introduced Visa Intelligent Commerce, a groundbreaking initiative that opens Visa's payments network to developers and engineers building the first generation of true AI commerce. Visa also announced new stablecoin partnerships to reach more people and geographies. Finally, Visa shared the expansion of its Flex Credential platform, and new products and services that provide more ways for people to pay and get paid. The advancements introduced today will enable the next wave of commerce and money movement. Visa Intelligent Commerce: A New Era In the last 25 years, Visa's network has processed 3.3 trillion transactions. Visa will extend the infrastructure, standards and capabilities present in physical and digital commerce today to AI commerce. Soon consumers will enable AI agents via AI platforms to use a Visa credential (of which there are 4.8 billion today) at any accepting merchant location (currently totaling over 150 million) for any payment use case. "Historically, Visa has used AI to protect consumers, harnessing it to help combat fraud. Now, we will also enable AI to empower consumers, fundamentally shifting digital commerce to make it more personal, more relevant and more delightful," added McInerney. "For any AI commerce use case to take hold, the payment is a critical enabler of success. If there is no payment, there is no commerce. That's the expertise and trust that Visa brings." To move the needle on AI commerce at the speed and scale required, the company is collaborating with the AI platforms and brands that consumers and merchants are choosing to work with every day, including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Stripe and Samsung. "We see tremendous potential for the role AI agents will play in commerce, from streamlining 'regular' transaction-driven tasks such as ordering groceries, to more sophisticated search and decision-making like securing that hard-to-get restaurant reservation or concert ticket," said Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer. "This will be a transformative change, bringing more magic and convenience to the consumer experience and creating a new world that will forever change how we shop and buy." New Products, Advancements and Capabilities Visa continues to invest in new features and capabilities that help extend the reach of its network and provide secure and seamless payment experiences. Stablecoins: For over half a decade, Visa has been facilitating crypto transactions and is now further expanding the applications for stablecoins with stablecoin-linked cards, settlement and programmable money. Bridge, a Stripe company, is working with Visa on a new card product that enables fintech developers to offer stablecoin-linked Visa cards to their end customers in multiple countries through a single API integration. Flex Credential Expansion: Last year, Visa reinvented the card with the introduction of the Flex Credential, a next generation card that can seamlessly toggle between different payment methods (debit, credit, buy now, pay later). Today, millions of people around the world are using the Flex Credential and Visa plans to roll out new use cases like expanding access to lines of credit, investment accounts, rewards, commercial cards and more. Unveiled today, Visa and Klarna are partnering to bring the Flex Credential to the U.S. and will be the first in Europe to offer a debit-to-buy now pay later use case that gives consumers more flexibility in how they pay. More details will be announced later this year. Introducing More Ways to Pay and Get Paid: Visa is also announcing more ways for consumers, merchants and partners to pay and get paid around the world. About Visa Visa (NYSE: V) is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere and see access as foundational to the future of money movement. Learn more at Visa.com.