Visa and OpenAI partner to let AI agents shop and complete transactions autonomously on ChatGPT

Visa plugs its payment network into ChatGPT, letting AI agents shop and pay for users

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Payments giant Visa said Wednesday that it has embedded its payment network inside of ChatGPT, empowering the chatbot to independently shop and complete transactions on behalf of its user. It means AI agents can not only recommend products but complete the purchase on the user's behalf, at potentially any merchant that accepts Visa. The payment network's previous attempts at this technological leap were confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants. It is not OpenAI's first attempt at e-commerce. The company late last year announced Instant Checkout, which allowed ChatGPT to scour the internet for a specific item like a digital personal shopper. But the process was prone to errors and was not widely adopted by merchants due to the fee that OpenAI was charging merchants. The company retired Instant Checkout in March. Visa's collaboration is different from OpenAI's previous attempts, as it will allow users to link their Visa cards to ChatGPT to shop and make it easier for merchants to accept transactions initiated by agents. OpenAI will provide the technology to allow agents to interact, make decisions and initiate purchases through ChatGPT. Visa, the world's largest payment network outside of China, will provide the payment authorization and fraud monitoring needed to do this at scale. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa. Speaking at a company event Wednesday in San Francisco Wednesday, Forestell gave an example of a customer telling ChatGPT they're looking for a pair of wireless headphones under $150. The chatbot would find a pair for sale under those parameters and buy it on behalf of the costumer. Visa and OpenAI did not disclose the financial terms of the collaboration and did not give details on the fees merchants or customers would have to pay. Instant Checkout charged merchants 4% of the transaction's value, which merchants saw as being too expensive. Allowing AI agents to buy products on behalf of a consumer raises concerns for both banks and retailers. A customer could overspend, or the agent buys the wrong item, or the customer claims they did not authorize that transaction. Banks have been concerned about potential fraud claims that could occur when an agent uses a bank customer's credit or debit card. Visa says the feature will have guardrails like spending limits, required approval steps and approved merchants for shopping in order to protect consumers and minimize fraud. Retailers have introduced shopping assistants powered by AI that can recommend products and personalize the customer's shopping experience, with the earliest iterations of those experiments being Amazon's Alexa. But Alexa could only shop on Amazon, and OpenAI's Instant Checkout feature was limited to select merchants. Visa's biggest competitor, Mastercard, has also been introducing its own AI-shopping features to its payment network on a smaller scale. Mastercard announced that AI agents will have the capability to procure services on behalf of a business. For example, a coffee shop wants to start an advertising campaign as part of a launch, so it gives an AI agent the authorization to purchase services from web and ad providers in order for the coffee shop to build out its campaign. ___ Sweet reported from New York.

Visa lets agents pay through OpenAI

Why it matters: The deal cements foundational infrastructure that could bring agentic commerce closer to broader adoption. Driving the news: The companies are integrating Visa's payments tools into OpenAI's agent system so AI agents can eventually complete transactions without users manually checking out every time. * Users would be able to set spending caps, merchant restrictions and approval requirements, while Visa handles fraud detection, chargebacks and refunds * The companies say the same setup could eventually support consumer shopping, business invoice payments and even AI coding agents buying APIs, compute or other developer services. What they're saying: "Agents will play an increasingly important role in helping people complete tasks that involve money -- from purchases and payments to more complex transactions," Marco Mahrus, OpenAI's head of partnerships and commerce, said. * More than one in five transactions are "really being influenced by what [users are] learning through LLMs," Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth, told Axios, adding that AI is influencing buying decisions more than previously anticipated. * The integration will "allow OpenAI, and then over time other platforms, to build better commerce experiences," Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth, told Axios. * It could end up feeling similar to the experience you get when shopping via Apple Pay or Shop Pay, he said. * The partnership creates the integration that can power agentic payments in the future, whatever form they come in, the companies say. Yes, but: Visa and OpenAI don't know exactly what this will look like for users yet. Between the lines: The partnership is about more than just letting an agent order and pay for pizza delivery. * OpenAI's Codex coding agents could eventually use authenticated payment credentials to purchase additional inference, APIs or other services autonomously within user-defined limits, for example. Flashback: OpenAI has previously experimented with bringing commerce into ChatGPT. * Instant Checkout, a native checkout experience meant to launch within ChatGPT, struggled to gain traction and was later scaled back, per The Information. The bottom line: OpenAI is opening the door to agentic commerce, but don't expect ChatGPT to become Amazon overnight.

Visa and OpenAI Unlock Agentic Commerce | PYMNTS.com

The companies' collaboration will enable secure payments across OpenAI, with Visa providing its global network, credentialing capabilities and security infrastructure to support agentic commerce for consumers and businesses, Visa said in a Wednesday (June 10) press release. Visa and OpenAI will also explore enterprise applications, including developer-focused ones powered by OpenAI's coding agent, Codex, as well as additional automated and conversational workflows, according to the release. The transactions enabled by this partnership will operate within clearly defined user permissions, policies and controls, including spending limits, merchant categories or required approvals. They will also use tokenized Visa credentials, real-time authorization and fraud monitoring, per the release. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said in the release. "That's the infrastructure we're building with partners like OpenAI." Marco Mahrus, head of partnerships, commerce at OpenAI, said in the release that agents will play an increasingly important role in purchases, payments and more complex transactions. "By integrating with Visa Intelligent Commerce, we're building the infrastructure for secure, transparent and user-controlled agentic transactions, helping people do more with AI agents while maintaining confidence that payments are being handled safely and securely," Mahrus said. Visa unveiled the Visa Intelligent Commerce program in April 2025, saying that it opens the network's rails to developers building AI agents that search, recommend and pay on behalf of consumers. Five modules included in the program at launch delivered authentication, tokenization, payment instructions, personalization, and transaction signals that trigger risk controls and aid dispute resolution. Mark Nelsen, who was Visa's global head of consumer products at the time and is now the company's head of product, commercial and money movement solutions, discussed Visa Intelligent Commerce with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster at the time of the program's launch. "This is going to transform shopping and buying," Nelsen said in the interview posted in April 2025. "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." In the PYMNTS Intelligence eBook "AI Changes Commerce. Visa Wants Trust to Scale With It," four Visa executives told PYMNTS that AI is reshaping payments, fraud prevention, banking infrastructure and commerce. For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

Visa to Secure Payments for Shoppers on ChatGPT in OpenAI Partnership

Visa will provide secure payment services for shopping within ChatGPT in a new collaboration with artificial-intelligence company OpenAI. Shoppers who use AI bots powered by OpenAI to buy products will have their purchases secured by Visa's network, security infrastructure and credentialing capabilities, the payments company said Wednesday. AI-powered transactions using Visa's network would be subject to user permissions and controls, including spending limits and required approvals, Visa said. The company and OpenAI also will collaborate on enterprise applications using OpenAI's Codex coding assistant as well as "more automated and conversational workflows," Visa said. The partnership is part of the Visa Intelligence Commerce initiative, a push to build secure payment capabilities in AI contexts. "AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did," Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," he added. OpenAI on Monday said it had filed confidentially for an initial public offering, shortly after rival AI company Anthropic said it had done the same. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.