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.

Ready for AI-enhanced credit cards? Here's Visa's vision of automated shopping

Imagine AI agents finding and ordering products for you. With this latest 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. Earlier this week, 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: Google's AI Mode may be the upgrade Search desperately needs - how to try it for free 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: ChatGPT is your personal shopper now 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. Just recently, 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 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.

Visa is piloting AI agents with payment systems for autonomous shopping

Forward-looking: Visa plans to allow AI agents to conduct financial transactions on behalf of consumers, a move that could streamline and automate everyday purchases. The company is currently running pilot programs that connect its payment network to AI platforms developed by firms such as Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Mistral, with broader adoption expected soon. By bridging the gap between AI's growing capabilities and secure payment processing, Visa is positioning itself to play a pivotal role in the next evolution of commerce. This initiative, called Visa Intelligent Commerce, addresses a persistent challenge for AI-powered shopping assistants: securely completing purchases without human intervention. While digital assistants are becoming adept at helping users discover and select products, the final step - making a payment - has typically required direct user involvement. Visa aims to close this gap by integrating its payment infrastructure with AI systems, enabling digital agents to finalize transactions. As part of this effort, the company is introducing "AI-Ready Cards," which use tokenized digital credentials to protect sensitive card information. Over the past six months, Visa has collaborated with AI developers to tackle technical hurdles related to security, including authentication, user authorization, and spending controls. As part of this effort, the company is introducing "AI-Ready Cards," which use tokenized digital credentials to protect sensitive card information. These measures are designed to ensure that AI agents can only make purchases within boundaries explicitly set by users. Potential uses for these AI agents include handling routine tasks like buying groceries or booking travel. However, Visa anticipates that human involvement will remain central to more personalized or high-value shopping experiences, such as purchasing luxury goods. Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer, described the company's efforts as "transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself." He noted that while early versions of AI commerce agents are effective at product discovery, they still face significant challenges when it comes to completing payments. "You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, 'OK, you go buy it,'" he said. Also read: AI Agents Explained - The Next Evolution in Artificial Intelligence Forestell also emphasized that consumers will retain control by setting specific spending limits and rules for their AI agents. "At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to confirm specific purchases, such as an airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might gain more autonomy - for example, 'Go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B,'" he explained. Developers participating in the program see further opportunities to personalize user experiences. With user consent, AI agents could access transaction histories to better understand individual preferences and tailor recommendations. "Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us. 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," Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at Perplexity, told The Associated Press. Visa's initiative comes at a time when the payments industry is shifting away from physical cards and card numbers. The company says its system is designed to reassure users, banks, and merchants that purchases made by AI agents are legitimate and secure, with safeguards in place for dispute resolution and fraud prevention.

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 launches 'Intelligent Commerce' platform, letting AI agents swipe your card -- safely, it says

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Visa has launched a new platform designed to let artificial intelligence agents purchase products on behalf of users, effectively giving AI access to people's credit cards -- with strict guardrails. The system, called Visa Intelligent Commerce, was unveiled last Wednesday at the company's Global Product Drop event in San Francisco and enables AI assistants to not only recommend products but complete transactions. "Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase, and manage on their behalf," said Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer, during the announcement. "These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well." The initiative is built on a network of partnerships with leading AI companies including Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, and Stripe, among others. This collaboration aims to embed payment capabilities directly into AI systems that are already transforming how consumers discover products and services. AI shopping assistants move beyond product discovery to complete purchases Visa's new platform addresses a critical gap in the current AI commerce landscape. While AI systems have become increasingly sophisticated at helping users find products, they typically hit a wall when it comes to completing transactions. "AI commerce is a new commerce experience where AI agents play an active role in helping users shop online," explained Rubail Birwadker, SVP and Head of Growth, Products & Partnerships at Visa, in an interview with VentureBeat. "Today, agents help largely with product discovery, but with Visa Intelligent Commerce they will start to transact on behalf of users." The system works by replacing traditional card details with tokenized digital credentials that can be securely accessed by authorized AI agents. Users maintain control by setting specific parameters, such as spending limits and merchant categories, while the AI handles the transaction details. For example, a consumer could instruct their AI assistant to book a flight to Cancún under $500, order weekly groceries, or find the perfect gift for a family member. The AI would search across multiple sites, compare options, and complete the purchase -- all without requiring the consumer to manually enter payment information at each step. "There is tremendous potential for the role AI agents will play across a wide variety of commerce use cases, from everyday tasks such as ordering groceries, to more sophisticated search and decision-making like booking vacations," Birwadker noted. How Visa plans to make AI transactions secure in an era of digital fraud The announcement comes at a time when concerns about AI security and data privacy remain high among consumers. Visa appears to have anticipated these concerns by making security a central feature of the platform. "Visa takes an intelligence-driven approach to understanding new and novel fraud and cybercrime threats against emerging technology," Birwadker said. "Just like we identified, researched and built controls and best practices for using generative AI, Visa is also committed to identifying, researching and mitigating threat actor activity targeting agentic commerce." The company is leveraging its decades of experience in fraud detection and prevention, with executives noting that Visa's AI and machine learning systems blocked approximately $40 billion in fraud last year alone. The system includes several key security components. The AI-Ready Cards replace traditional card details with tokenized credentials, enhancing security while simplifying the payment process. The platform also implements identity verification, confirming that a consumer's chosen AI agent is authorized to act on their behalf. "Only the consumer can instruct the agent on what to do and when to activate a payment credential," the company emphasized. Additionally, transactions generate signals that are shared with Visa in real-time, enabling the company to enforce transaction controls and assist with dispute management. "Transactions made by an AI agent will be tokenized, meaning the card details are replaced," Birwadker explained. "For personalization, Visa uses a data privacy-preserving framework. Data requests are managed through data tokens, which allows for consent management and control by the consumer, payment credential tokenization for the purpose of data sharing, and secure and encrypted transmission of data." Personalized shopping with guardrails: How Consumers Keep Control of AI Spending A distinguishing feature of Visa's approach is the emphasis on user control. Consumers can set spending limits, specify merchant categories, and even require real-time approval for certain transactions. Mark Nelsen, Visa's global head of consumer products, told PYMNTS that the system allows consumers to set parameters such as a "$500 ceiling for a hotel or an airline ticket." The AI agent then works within these constraints, finding options that meet the consumer's criteria without exceeding preset limits. "For personalization, Visa uses a data privacy-preserving framework," Birwadker told VentureBeat. "Data requests are managed through data tokens, which allows for consent management and control by the consumer, payment credential tokenization for the purpose of data sharing, and secure and encrypted transmission of data." This approach reflects Visa's understanding that consumer adoption hinges on maintaining a sense of agency while delegating shopping tasks to AI. The company has carefully designed a system where convenience doesn't come at the expense of control. Visa positions itself at the center of AI commerce revolution with 200-country network The announcement represents Visa's effort to position itself at the center of what could become the next major shift in how consumers shop online -- potentially as significant as the transitions from physical to digital shopping and from desktop to mobile commerce. "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," Forestell said. "Now, with Visa Intelligent Commerce, AI agents can find, shop and buy for consumers based on their pre-selected preferences." Industry analysts note that Visa's global footprint -- spanning more than 200 countries and territories -- gives it a significant advantage in scaling this technology. The company's existing tokenization framework and merchant relationships provide the infrastructure needed to make AI commerce viable on a global scale. When asked about adoption timelines, Birwadker expressed confidence in the technology's future: "AI adoption is real and the numbers prove it. When you see metrics like OpenAI topping 400 million users and other GenAI platforms building their audiences, it's hard to imagine AI commerce not catching up. Visa Intelligent Commerce is a critical step and building block for the industry to start form and help create widespread adoption." The company indicated that developers can begin implementing the APIs immediately, with pilot programs expected to launch in the coming months. Trust remains a key challenge for consumers giving AI access to financial data Despite the enthusiasm from Visa and its partners, some consumers and privacy advocates remain skeptical about giving AI agents access to payment information. The company appears to be taking a measured approach to address these concerns. Visa's system allows consumers to start with small, low-risk transactions before granting their AI assistants greater purchasing authority. The company emphasizes that consumers retain the same protections and fraud safeguards they currently have with their Visa cards, even when transactions are initiated by AI agents. The extensive partnerships Visa has developed for this initiative demonstrate its commitment to building a comprehensive ecosystem rather than an isolated product. "We're working with each of the partners you mentioned to bring better commerce experiences to consumers," Birwadker told us. "For example, with OpenAI we're enabling agentic commerce securely and safely at scale. And those aren't the only ones we're working with - we're currently with more than 20 payment service providers and AI infrastructure enablers on this program." AI shopping assistants could end the era of abandoned shopping carts Visa's announcement comes amid growing competition in the AI commerce space. Several technology companies and financial institutions are exploring ways to integrate AI into the shopping experience, though few have unveiled comprehensive solutions that bridge product discovery and payment. What distinguishes Visa's approach is the focus on embedding payment capabilities directly into the AI agents that consumers are already using for other tasks. Rather than creating a separate shopping assistant, Visa is opening its payment rails to existing AI platforms, potentially accelerating adoption. This strategy also addresses the current fragmentation in online shopping, where consumers often need to create accounts and enter payment information across multiple sites and apps. By allowing AI agents to handle these transactions seamlessly, Visa aims to reduce cart abandonment and simplify the commerce experience. "Unlike existing e-commerce, which places the task on consumers to search and transact, Visa Intelligent Commerce will enable seamless and scalable transactions through autonomous agents," Birwadker said. From Cashiers to Algorithms: The Future of Shopping Has AI at the Checkout As Visa prepares to roll out its Intelligent Commerce platform, the boundaries between human and artificial decision-making continue to blur in the commerce landscape. For decades, we've entrusted humans -- from retail clerks to travel agents -- with our shopping needs. Now we stand at the threshold of trusting algorithms with not just our product searches, but our wallets as well. The ultimate success of Visa's initiative will depend not on the technology itself, which is increasingly capable, but on the psychological shift it requires from consumers. People who grew up memorizing credit card numbers and guarding them closely must now decide whether the convenience of AI-powered shopping outweighs ingrained caution about financial data. Throughout history, shoppers have always adapted to new ways to buy -- from marketplace haggling to department stores, from mail-order catalogs to e-commerce -- each transition has required consumers to place their trust in new systems. Visa's AI commerce initiative asks for perhaps the most profound trust leap yet: allowing an artificial agent to not only know what we want but to spend our money acquiring it. As shoppers face this choice, they're not just evaluating a new technology. They're deciding whether to outsource the final human element in commerce -- the decision to buy.

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 Announces Plans to Give AI Agents Your Credit Card Information

Visa -- yes, the multinational credit card titan -- is wading into the world of AI agents. On Wednesday, the finance monolith announced it would be teaming up with some of the AI industry's leading developers to connect its vast payments network to their AI systems. The end game? Letting an autonomous AI model -- an agent, in the parlance -- control your credit card to make purchases ranging from groceries to clothing on its own, based on your budget and preferences. "Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf," Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer, said in a release. "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," he added. Visa is calling the initiative, which it has been working on for the past six months, "Visa Intelligent Commerce." Among its murderer's row of AI developers are OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Mistral -- along with other big names in tech like IBM, Samsung, and payment company Stripe. Envisioning a near future in which "millions of people will soon rely on AI to find the perfect sweater, research a new vacation spot or fulfill their grocery list," Visa says it will offer AI-ready cards that ditch traditional credit card details in favor of "tokenized digital credentials," which it says will be more secure. "Only the consumer can instruct the agent on what to do and when to activate a payment credential," the company emphasized in its release. Per the Associated Press, Forestell imagines that customers will use AI agents to perform routine errands like shop for groceries or handle complicated purchases like travel bookings. But he doesn't think it'll supplant other shopping experiences that we actually enjoy, like buying luxury goods, instead taking a secondary, advice-giving role. However the AI agents are used, this is predicated on customers trusting a technology which is infamously error-prone and fraught with security risks with their sensitive financial records. Not to mention the AI developers themselves: it's access to this valuable credit card information, like your past purchases -- with your consent -- that's wooed AI companies to work with Visa. "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, told the AP. "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." There's clearly blood in the water. Mastercard announced its own AI agent initiative on Tuesday, called "Agent Pay," featuring some of the same collaborators including Microsoft, OpenAI, and IBM. Like Visa's, the Mastercard AI agent will be able to make recommendations through conversational interactions and pull the trigger on purchases. It remains to be seen how these AI-credit-card crossovers will work in practice. The glimpses of AI agent shopping so far haven't been very impressive. Users of OpenAI's "Operator" AI agent complained that it can be excruciatingly slow while performing tasks like buying groceries or ordering takeout. It also has to be constantly babysat, and needs a human to enter passwords and credit card info, and to ultimately approve purchases. Of course, that's before Visa entered the picture. Its hope is that its collaboration with tech companies will enable to the AI agents to actually make the purchases by themselves, without needing a human to step in. "The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell told AP. "That's why we started working with them."

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."

When Chatbots Replace Search Bars, Who Wins at Checkout? | PYMNTS.com

Perplexity started it in November of 2024 with Buy with Pro. Then Open AI with ChatGPT followed in April 2025. These two large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving from friendly chatbots that could write a great prospect email or blog post into helpful AI shopping assistants capable of turning a 150-word search prompt into a purchase. And, all without the user ever visiting a store or hitting a buy button. It's a transformation that could fundamentally reshape retail. As OpenAI, Perplexity, and others race to capture this trillion-dollar opportunity, the future of how consumers search and buy hinges on two critical questions: how these platforms will make money, and how their algorithms will decide which products to show consumers (or buy on their behalf). The answers will determine whether these chatbots deliver on their promise of personalized commerce in their truest and most authentic sense -- or become a more sophisticated version of today's pay-to-play search and commerce platforms. Where visibility goes to the highest bidder rather than the best match. The world's first department store opened in 1852 in Paris. Le Bon Marche was a big deal in its day. For the first time, consumers could stroll through a single store and see a collection of products that once required separate trips to separate stores -- all without the pressure to buy. Fixed prices eliminated haggling, and shopping became both social and transactional. It would take another century before the idea of assembling multiple stores in a single enclosed structure called a mall would open in Edina, Minnesota. The year was 1956. Thirty-nine years later, Amazon would take the mall online. As all of you know, what started as an online bookstore in 1995 would become the world's largest online retailer, accounting for more than half of the world's online sales today. Roughly ten years after Google's launch in 1998, the rise of vertical platforms like Houzz, 1 Dibs and Etsy gave consumers access to product search and discovery alternatives, and a more direct connection between consumer intent and the purchase of specific goods without leaving those sites. In the mid to late 2010s, social commerce sites like Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok brought creators, influencers and consumers together to find, discover and buy from brands new and emerging. Today, less than three years after the launch of Open AI's ChatGPT, shopping agents are positioned to become invisible sales conversion engines. Their strength as a conversational interface, capable of understanding complex requests, makes them well-suited to complete purchases without users ever visiting a physical or digital store or leaving the conversation. Provided they have a little -- well, actually, a lot -- of help from their payments and commerce friends. An emerging Agentic AI commerce ecosystem now stands at the ready to help advance their ambitions. Card networks, payment processors, FinTechs and AdTech startups use tokenized credentials and established payment infrastructure to collapse the traditional browse-select-purchase journey into a natural conversation capable of making a sale. Existing technology foundations and massive infusions of capital fuel this momentum. The enthusiasm across the payments and commerce ecosystem to support a new way of matching consumers and merchants creates mutually reinforcing tailwinds. Now, granted, these are very, very early days. Google processes 8.5 billion daily searches (heading toward 13 billion some analysts report) and delivers three quarters of Google's massive sales engine. It is integrating AI-overviews into search results. Amazon's Alexa serves tens of millions Prime Members whose intention is purely transactional on their platform. A new souped-up subscription Alexa is touted as handling complex searches and completing them, all tied to the Amazon ecosystem of third-party sellers and 600 million connected devices that are Alexa-enabled. Large platforms like Expedia and Booking.com and Airbnb are developing their own agents to help travelers navigate and book complex travel-related requests without leaving their platforms. But the speed at which the GenAI chatbots have amassed an audience shows the potential for how these models could upend the retail and commerce status quo by changing where consumers start their searches and end by making a purchase without a lot of steps or friction in between. Where the very concept of "shopping" becomes a contextual, embedded part of a conversation with a chatbot. Those conversations are much more detailed and have the potential to become much more transactional, just like any face-to-face conversation with a knowledgeable sales associate. For instance, instead of asking a Google search to recommend a highly-rated paint brand, an AI chatbot query might start by asking what top designers might recommend as the right color for a living room that gets the morning sun and has yellow and green upholstery. That response could become the starting point for a purchase that is context first, product and brand recommendation second. It's a threat that extends far beyond the traditional search and discovery platforms like Google and Amazon. Retailers could find themselves caught in the proverbial chatbot crossfire. As AI agents increasingly handle the search and presentation of results (or completed sales), traditional retailers risk becoming invisible in the commerce ecosystem altogether. In the good old days of organic search, retailers and businesses optimized their products to index on Google. Elaborate schemes to play nice with Google were the purview of many digital, SEO and paid media teams. In the world of GenAI, how to get indexed remains a mystery box. Everyone sees the LLMs pinging their sites to train their models, but the algorithm for training the model and being presented as an AI overview on Google or part of the conversational search return is unclear. And therein lies the complexity and uncertainty of this exciting and potentially transformative new world. No one -- retailers, consumers, data networks or issuers -- really understand how these AI shopping agents will work, how they make their recommendations, or the business model that will support making them. In this world, payment credentials might emerge as the real winner as embedded offers, financing, rewards and other data-driven incentives become an invisible part of the transaction. The venture capital pouring into these platforms signals expectations for massive adoption and ROI. OpenAI's $300 billion valuation, with Anthropic, Perplexity and others following suit, represents more than just Silicon Valley optimism. These investors seem to be betting on a fundamental restructuring of how commerce works. The question isn't whether these platforms will monetize shopping, but how they'll do it. History offers both cautionary tales and hopeful precedents. In 1998, Google launched with a mission to "organize the world's information." It had to make money and naturally turned to ads. At first, this was limited to a few clearly marked ad-supported searches on the right side of the page that were easily distinguished from organic results. Eventually there were "sponsored results" at the top of the page, shopping carousels, and featured snippets from paying partners. Much of the entire first page more or less became premium real estate for sale to the highest bidder. Amazon's journey followed a similar path. Amazon was launched as a customer-obsessive platform, promising unbiased product search and honest reviews. But as the platform matured, sponsored products crept into search results, then dominated them. The company that disrupted retail by eliminating middlemen became the ultimate intermediary, making billions in advertising revenue from brands willing to pay for priority placement in front of Amazon's high spending Prime Members. Amazon's Q1 2025 results posted $13.9 million in ad revenue from Amazon's retail network. Amazon and Google's transformations from organic search to sponsored posts happened gradually. And after consumers had invested years in honing their searching and shopping habits on those platforms. They've gotten used to scrolling past sponsored content and wondering how reliable those five-star products are. Because for now, at least, there's no suitable alternative, at scale, to fill the gap. As LLMs platforms race to capture retail market share, they face a fundamental choice between short-term monetization and long-term trust building. The temptation to follow the proven path of advertising-based models will be strong, especially as investors pressure for returns. GenAI represents a new form of commerce orchestration across marketplaces, social signals and retail inventory through a simple and single conversational interface. The unique nature of conversational AI suggests that different approaches might not just be possible but necessary to compete. LLM platforms can build on GenAI's growing sense of user trust, its potential for creating a distinctive new shopping and buying utility and its ability to monetize these new forms of value. How these models present recommendations and act on behalf of users presents new challenges because of their current lack of clarity -- and new opportunities because of what they could become for the entire commerce ecosystem. And that could reshape how retailers and the ecosystem adapt their products and platforms to drive sales. For retailers and brands, that now means competing for both customer and AI attention. Retailers will need to ensure their inventory, pricing and product information are optimized for AI crawling and decision-making algorithms. And that their brands are beloved enough to become part of the user prompt. That's a challenge without knowing how the LLM is making choices. Unlike Google's PageRank algorithm, which follows explicit, auditable rules, these LLMs generate responses through complex neural networks that even their creators can't fully explain. It's why no one really understands how and why they continue to hallucinate -- and do so most convincingly. This opacity could create the most precise consumer-product-price matching ever experienced -- or deliver subtle forms of influence that would be impossible to detect or regulate. The conversational nature of these interactions adds another layer of complexity. Traditional search engines respond to explicit keyword-based queries with discrete results. AI assistants engage in dynamic dialogues. A search query about planning a vacation can easily become an AI-agent's task to make hotel bookings, restaurant reservations and must-see tourist attractions. Each touchpoint represents an opportunity for commercial influence -- unless it is clear how these models will monetize those interactions. And how brands and retailers must adapt their strategies to remain a relevant part of what those AI-agents surface. That said, when properly designed, these systems could understand consumer needs with a level of nuance and accuracy that goes well beyond simple product matching based on organic search and clicks. An AI agent might recognize that someone living in Boston buying patio furniture in November might find end-of-season sales appealing. And even suggest a slightly more expensive set that will last three times longer because of its weather-proof coating, ultimately saving money. What we have learned over observing the last 173 years of retail transformation is that whoever controls search and discovery controls the commerce experience for consumers and retailers. And that the best commerce experiences combine authority with relevant context, efficiency with ease of use and transacting with trust. The rise of AI shopping assistants creates new and interesting possibilities for how these platforms deliver on that potential, and how they monetize these transformative experiences. Today, the LLMs who have dipped their toes into the shopping pool say the service will be free. That won't last for long. But instead of simply recreating the sponsored search model with a conversational interface, these AI agents have the potential to do something much more innovative. The winners in this new era may be those who recognize that when conversations drive commerce, trust itself becomes the product. And that monetizing trust comes wrapped around a different business model. Technology exists to create either future. The choice lies with those building these systems and the consumers who will ultimately determine whether they are, indeed, better than the current retail status quo.

Visa, Mastercard, PayPal Fuel Agentic AI Commerce Boom | PYMNTS.com

This week, all three announced they were deploying agentic commerce, a fast-emerging trend in which AI agents not only assist consumers with shopping but also complete transactions on their behalf. "These technologies have the potential to radically transform commerce, to radically transform how we all shop, how we all buy, and how commerce works at its most fundamental layers," said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney at a livestreamed company product unveiling. Agentic commerce will be rolling out in the next few quarters, McInerney said in a separate interview with Bloomberg TV. The three companies' agentic commerce initiatives are: At the heart of Visa and Mastercard's agentic commerce capabilities is the idea of tokenization, creating a new 16-digit series of numbers -- or a cryptographically protected token -- linked to the consumer's original card and giving it to the AI agent to use. It's like giving the AI agent its own credit card but with strict, parental-style controls. Consumers decide when to activate it, what the agent can buy and how much it can spend. It only works for that AI agent. According to the PYMNTS Intelligence report "Why Network Tokenization is eCommerce's Newest Essential," network tokens, provisioned by the major payment card networks in partnership with issuing banks, enable merchants to protect sensitive card payment information while reducing costs and boosting sales. PayPal's approach is different. It offers a developer toolkit and access tokens that let AI agents interact directly with PayPal's platform through APIs. APIs are pieces of code that let software programs quickly integrate a capability, like plug and play. "The rise of agentic commerce represents a seismic shift in digital retail, following the waves of eCommerce and mobile, with profound implications for consumers, retailers and financial institutions," Jerry Sheldon, an analyst at IHL, told PYMNTS. Martin Balaam, CEO of Pimberly, which curates product data for retailers, manufacturers and distributors, said agentic commerce is revolutionary. "It's a chance to meet customers right at the moment of intent -- no more hoping they click through a catalog or keyword ad," Balaam told PYMNTS. "AI can surface exactly the right SKU based on a nuanced request," such as, "Show me eco-friendly running shoes under $100." "Search as we know it will inevitably give way to intent understanding," Balaam said. "Instead of 10 blue links, shoppers will get a curated set of product suggestions, comparisons and even proactive deals based on their profile and behavior." That also means retailers must optimize for this new landscape to ensure that consumers are directed to their products, Neil Saunders, managing director and retail analyst at GlobalData, told PYMNTS. Winners will be those retailers that feed the AI agent the right data, such as "real-time inventory, pricing, product and purchasing" information so they show up in the AI agent's recommendations," Sheldon said. Those who don't risk losing out. AI agents can better match consumers to what they want, so this could "significantly" reduce returns, he said. For consumers, an AI agent acts as a concierge that can plan, shop and pay for them, saving them time and effort. But to get them to engage in the technology, gaining their trust is paramount. "Agentic commerce is poised to redefine convenience and efficiency in retail, but its success will depend on building trust, ensuring transparency, and working hand-in-hand with regulators to protect consumers," Sheldon said. Sheldon said the following features are needed to scale agentic commerce.

This Week in AI: Visa, Mastercard and PayPal Go All in on Agentic Commerce | PYMNTS.com

This week brings fresh news on the digital payments front, with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal unveiling their agentic commerce programs. Their moves represent a significant shift to the payments landscape, fueled by agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can pay on behalf of consumers. Also this week, a PYMNTS Intelligence report showed that 90% of health care executives are seeing positive ROI for generative AI, which is fueling their GenAI investments for the future. Finally, Apple said it needs more time to upgrade Siri and warned of a Q3 tariff hit. Visa introduced an agentic AI system that would equip AI agents with the ability to pay for purchases and bookings on behalf of consumers, not just shop for them. Called "Visa Intelligent Commerce," the program opens the network's rails to developers building AI agents that search, recommend and make payments using special cards that link back to the user's original card. People have been increasingly using AI chatbots to shop and plan for things like vacation travel, according to Visa. But the missing link has been a payment mechanism, until now. "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. Read more: Visa Gives AI Shopping Agents 'Intelligent Commerce' Superpowers Mastercard has launched an agentic AI-driven payments program called "Agent Pay." The new offering uses Mastercard's Agentic Tokens, which the company said builds upon tokenization capabilities that power global commerce solutions like mobile contactless payments. Mastercard is working with Microsoft and IBM on this technology, with other AI leaders to follow. The company will also work with checkout players like Braintree and Checkout.com to enhance tokenization capabilities. "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. See also: Mastercard Debuts Agent Pay to Promote 'Agentic Commerce Future' PayPal introduced the PayPal Agent Toolkit, which enables developers to integrate its payment processes into the agentic AI workflow. The company offers a developer toolkit and access tokens that let AI agents interact directly with PayPal's platform through application programming interfaces (APIs). "The future is here," PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said in this week's earnings call. "Now any business can create agentic experiences that allow customers to pay, track shipments, manage invoices and more, all powered by PayPal and all within an AI client." More here: PayPal Details Agentic Commerce Initiatives and Strategic Focus on Value-Added Services According to recent research from PYMNTS Intelligence, the healthcare sector is bullish about GenAI, and most have already deployed the technology in key areas like product innovation and customer service. The report polled C-suite executives at healthcare companies generating at least $1 billion in annual revenue. Companies are both seeing and expecting positive ROI, which fuels future plans for additional investments in the technology. The report also showed that 59% of healthcare executives said they would increase their GenAI investment in the next year, a figure higher than the 52% cross-industry average. Related: 90% of Healthcare Execs Already See Positive ROI From GenAI Investments Apple CEO Tim Cook is asking consumers to be patient since the company needs "more time" to upgrade Siri up to the standards set by competitors like Amazon's Alexa and voice-enabled AI chatbots. "We need more time to complete our work on these features so they meet our high-quality bar," Cook said during Apple's earnings call with analysts. "We are making progress, and we look forward to getting these features into customers' hands." Cook also said that Apple expects to see a $900 million increase in costs due to tariffs during its fiscal third quarter, basing that number on current tariff policy. "We estimate the impact, assuming that the current global tariff rates, policies and applications don't change for the balance of the quarter, to be $900 million to our cost," Cook said. Cook also disputed the rebuke from a federal judge who said this week that Apple was in "willful violation" of a 2021 injunction related to the Epic Games lawsuit. The court had ordered Apple to let developers find a way to get paid by users without going through the Apple App Store, to avoid Apple's 30% fee. The judge said Apple then assessed a 27% fee for outside sales. Cook said Apple disagrees with the ruling and will appeal.

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.

Visa and Mastercard Will Let AI Shopping Bots Spend Your Money for You

Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay will let AI agents initiate payments on behalf of consumers. | Credit: Spencer Platt / Getty Images. Visa and Mastercard this week unveiled new technology platforms that will enable AI agents to make payments. Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay's AI personal shoppers will be able to search for deals, compare prices and make purchases on users' behalf. Some of the biggest names in AI are already working to deploy the technology. Visa and Mastercard Advance AI Payments Thanks to advances in AI computer use, platforms like ChatGPT can perform an increasingly wide range of tasks. For example, OpenAI's Operator can fill out forms, order groceries and make restaurant reservations. For security reasons, these platforms tend to draw a line at automating payments, and typically ask users to take over when they need to input sensitive information like passwords and card details. Now, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay can replace card details with tokenized digital credentials. These confirm that a consumer's chosen agent is allowed to initiate payments on their behalf. AI Personal Shoppers Are Coming Potential use cases for the new technology include AI personal shoppers that can automatically search for and purchase products at the best prices. While tools like Amazon's Alexa Shopping Service are limited to a single platform, in the future, AI assistants will be able to purchase anything that can be paid for with a Visa or Mastercard. Beyond automated purchases, the new technology could enable AI platforms to analyze past transaction data to create personalized recommendations. Even without direct access to financial data, this trend is already being driven by advertisers and e-commerce companies. "We're working with companies at the forefront of AI innovation to encourage AI platform participation and support new ways to pay," said Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Jack Forestell. Meanwhile, Mastercard said it would "collaborate with Microsoft on new use cases to scale agentic commerce, with other leading AI platforms to follow." Both card scheme operators have also tapped IBM to help develop AI payment solutions. Mastercard specifically mentioned IBM's watsonx Orchestrate -- a productivity solution businesses use to automate various workflows. By incorporating AI payments into platforms like IBM's, agents could streamline procurement processes by managing subscriptions, reordering supplies and handling invoices.

AI Agents to Make Payments: Visa and Mastercard Lead Shift

AI agents can now pay on behalf of users, with Visa and Mastercard rolling out systems that let AI assistants browse, choose, and make purchases using secure tokenized credentials. Mastercard calls its platform Agent Pay, while Visa has launched Intelligent Commerce, both part of a global shift toward agentic commerce, where AI tools act on users' behalf to complete financial transactions. Both companies have partnered with major tech firms like Microsoft, OpenAI, and the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to enable secure, personalised payments. They claim users will have control over what their AI agents can do and spend. But what happens if the AI overspends or makes a mistake? In India, the legal and regulatory frameworks may not yet be ready for this kind of AI-powered automation. Visa and Mastercard say their systems will let AI agents initiate and complete purchases using digital tokens instead of card details. Visa's AI-Ready Cards and Mastercard's Agentic Tokens are both tokenised credentials designed for AI agents. These tokens help verify user identities, enforce spending limits, and process payments securely without exposing sensitive data. The goal is to make commerce seamless and personalised. AI agents could soon handle everything from shopping for birthday gifts to making B2B cross-border transactions. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) and the draft DPDP Rules, 2025 lay out broad rights for users -- like giving consent, asking for data erasure, and filing complaints. But they don't spell out what happens when an AI agent steps in to make financial decisions for a user. There's no clarity yet on how delegated consent, agent-controlled data use, or token-based transactions powered by AI should work. The RBI's tokenization guidelines also stick to more traditional setups as they cover user-initiated payments through phones, watches, or other personal devices, but not situations where an AI assistant makes the purchase. In the absence of regulation, platforms get to define these terms themselves. India's financial authorities are embracing AI but mostly for backend operations. The RBI Innovation Hub launched MuleHunter.AI to detect mule accounts involved in fraud. Meanwhile, NPCI is testing AI models that assign fraud-risk scores and flag suspicious UPI transactions. These systems show that regulators already use AI in sensitive financial functions. However, they have not defined how consumer-facing AI agents should be governed, especially if they begin initiating payments. So far, RBI, MeitY, and NPCI haven't released any circulars, advisories, or draft rules that clearly spell out how AI agents should be allowed to make payments. The RBI's digital lending guidelines and tokenization FAQs don't cover delegated AI actions. The DPDPA lacks enforceable standards for AI agent behavior or financial liability. If AI agents start handling routine tasks like paying bills or booking public services, they could end up automating financial decisions before India has put legal safeguards or proper user checks in place. MeitY's proposed AI Governance Board and ethics framework -- though focused on public sector AI, suggest that the government is beginning to think about oversight. But until clear rules emerge, agentic commerce will likely remain under-regulated. Kiran Nambiar, co-founder and CEO of MYfi by TIFIN, shared his views on agentic commerce: Agentic workflows in commerce and beyond are becoming essential. This evolution is not just about improving efficiency, but also enabling greater accessibility and inclusion. In a country as diverse as India -- with its multitude of languages and wide-ranging digital literacy -- agentic systems that allow users to simply speak to complete complex tasks could be truly transformative. All modes of interaction -- manual or automated -- carry inherent risks. AI receives heightened scrutiny because it is both relatively new and operates at a potentially exponential scale. That said, when designed with the right safeguards, AI systems can actually enhance the safety and security of transactions. For instance, beyond OTP-based verifications, voice recognition can serve as an additional layer of authorization. I believe AI systems should act more as co-pilots than autonomous decision-makers, empowering users to make the final call based on well-presented information. Given the rapid pace of technological innovation, current safeguards -- while foundational -- are likely insufficient on their own. Regulatory frameworks, such as RBI's tokenisation guidelines, are an important starting point, but they must evolve in tandem with the tech landscape. In parallel, private organisations developing AI-powered systems should proactively invest in enhanced security measures to protect users. We almost can't protect against what we don't know yet. A helpful analogy is to consider how one would interact with a trusted human assistant. What consents and confirmations would you expect? Replicating these behaviours in agentic systems is a good baseline -- but not sufficient. True traceability is critical: every decision made by the AI agent should be logged, along with the rationale. This ensures both accountability and the opportunity for system improvement. While the agent should handle complexity in the background, users must always have visibility and the final say -- particularly before high-impact actions like transactions. Financial institutions must take a leadership role in defining norms around transparency, accountability, and dispute resolution in AI-driven payments. While regulators will continue to play a critical role, institutions delivering these services are best positioned to anticipate challenges and implement safeguards early. Particularly with dispute resolution, users should retain ultimate authority to mitigate errors arising from automated decisions. Over time, as systems mature and build trust, these models can gradually evolve into being more autonomous. Agentic commerce is not just about convenience but it reshapes the relationship between users, AI systems, and financial infrastructure. If AI agents can act and spend on a user's behalf, they should also be bound by clear legal limits. India's current data protection and payment laws were not designed for agentic systems. Without updates, users may not know when an AI is transacting for them, what data it uses, or how to dispute a mistake. As Visa and Mastercard move fast on these tools, India's lawmakers and regulators must decide whether they will catch up or let platforms define the future of money on their own terms.

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.