Visa and OpenAI partner to enable AI payments through ChatGPT at 175 million merchant locations

Visa Wants to Let You Give ChatGPT Your Credit Card. What Could Go Wrong?

Dashia is the consumer insights editor for CNET. She specializes in data-driven analysis and news at the intersection of tech, personal finance and consumer sentiment. Dashia investigates economic shifts and everyday challenges to help readers make well-informed decisions, and she covers a range of topics, including technology, security, energy and money. Dashia graduated from the University of South Carolina with a bachelor's degree in journalism. She loves baking, teaching spinning and spending time with her family. Imagine a world where AI can book a flight and order new luggage on your credit card. Don't spend too long imagining; we're already living in it. Visa said this week that it's partnering with OpenAI to allow you to make Visa payments on its ChatGPT AI chatbot. Visa announced the news at Visa Payments Forum 2026 on Wednesday in San Francisco. Visa plans to use tokenization, which replaces your 16-digit card number with a random string of numbers to safeguard your information when you pay online. The partnership is a part of Visa Intelligent Commerce, the payment processor's platform for agentic commerce. The goal is for OpenAI and Visa to join forces to let ChatGPT initiate and complete transactions -- without your help. How safe is that? Creating an entirely new layer to the digital payment landscape can create many problems, says Daniella Flores, an AI and machine learning technical writer, financial and career writer, and former CNET Money Expert Review Board member. "In any situation, not just this one, the more parties that have your payment credentials, the more opportunity there is for data breaches and theft," Flores said in an email to CNET. How will ChatGPT work with Visa? A Visa spokesperson said in an email to CNET that the goal for Visa's OpenAI partnership with Visa is to make shopping easier and more efficient while making sure consumers still decide when, where and how their money is spent. "Consumers remain fully in control," the spokesperson said. "AI agents can only initiate purchases within clearly defined, user-set parameters, such as spending limits, approved merchants, or required approvals." Visa said in a press release that it's planning for other AI-driven tools and features, like an Agent Score rating system for merchants to evaluate whether or not their website is ready for AI commerce. There's also an Agentic Directory coming for merchants to know which AI agents to trust for transactions, including Visa-verified agents and merchants. The company also plans to use an AI model to improve fraud detection. We'll have to wait and see when this feature rolls out, where it's available first and what its limitations are. The problem with giving AI your payment information These security measures don't necessarily guarantee you won't fall victim to fraud or theft. And Visa and OpenAI haven't shared who would be responsible if the AI agent makes a costly mistake. Imagine trusting AI to buy your luggage, but choosing the wrong one or shipping it to the wrong address. The companies have not responded to a request for comment. Do people even want this? A Bain & Company 2025 survey found that about a quarter (24%) of US consumers surveyed would feel comfortable letting AI make a purchase for them. If most US adults aren't fans of bots shopping and buying for them, why enable it? AI is being positioned as a helpful tool to save us time, but that convenience comes at a cost when our personal information is at risk. And shopping is personal. While AI may be used to research, compare and recommend, many Americans don't want a bot acting autonomously on some of their most personal decisions using their hard-earned money. It's not OpenAI's first foray into shopping -- and OpenAI isn't unique among AI companies. ChatGPT already has ChatGPT Search, so you can shop, compare and buy items directly in the chat without going to an external website. The retired Visa Instant Checkout allowed the AI agent to be your personal shopper for an item. But the big difference for both is that you would complete the purchase yourself. AI-enabled shopping has been highlighted by other companies, like Google, Apple and Samsung, in their pitches about agentic AI. In the meantime, use AI in a way that you feel most comfortable -- even if that means not using it at all. "There is no pressure to use these AI tools. If you're not comfortable doing so, don't, especially if you don't understand how your data is being secured and what the AI agents can and can't do with that data," Flores said.

Visa is handling AI-prompted transactions for OpenAI - but can you trust it?

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways * Visa will secure agentic payments in OpenAI systems. * AI-driven payments are a still-developing security landscape. * Consumers and businesses alike face potential risks. Agentic commerce is a rapidly growing frontier of AI for consumers and businesses, reiterated by Google's recent launch of Universal Cart at I/O in May. This week, Visa and OpenAI further solidified that infrastructure -- but how reliable are AI agents when it comes to making purchases? On Wednesday, the two companies announced a partnership to provide Visa-protected agentic transactions within OpenAI and effectively "bring agentic commerce into the mainstream," as Visa said in its release. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, among its other authorization and security layers, will integrate with OpenAI interfaces, like Atlas and ChatGPT Shopping, and allow developers and merchants to accept payments from agents. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) "Transactions operate inside guardrails that the consumer or business sets: spending limits, required approval thresholds, and other permission layers that keep the buyer in command even when an agent is executing the work," Visa explained. For consumers, this looks like letting agents do your shopping research (complete with pre-set personalizations) and make routine purchases you feel comfortable enough to automate. For merchants, the idea is still that a more seamless buying experience across more AI-powered surfaces, where consumers increasingly are, appeals to new buyers. Also: How small businesses can survive AI shopping: 7 essential steps Visa's announcement also mentioned the partnership would apply to "OpenAI's expanding suite of AI-powered products," though it did not specify any involvement with the company's forthcoming "superapp" when ZDNET asked. "The goal is to make agentic commerce more accessible, trusted, and secure for consumers and businesses worldwide," the company continued, citing its Intelligent Commerce platform as the foundation for the partnership. A changing, risk-laden landscape Major financial players embracing agentic commerce isn't new. OpenAI has been developing its agentic commerce arm in earnest since it launched Instant Checkout, which uses the company's Agentic Commerce Protocol, developed with Stripe, to allow merchants to securely approve transactions through ChatGPT. At the time, ACP was joining Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and other similar launches that tried to make agentic commerce appear more secure and appealing. Also on Wednesday, Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines, which aims to scale and speed up transactions between agents. Also: I let ChatGPT Atlas do my Walmart shopping for me - here's how the AI browser agent did Still, many users are understandably skeptical of handing over any part of a purchasing process to AI agents, which have been known to go rogue. ZDNET asked Visa what it would advise consumers who are nervous about handing payment controls over to an agent, even within Visa's environment, and whether the company has a policy in place for if (or when) an agent bypasses safeguards or initiates an unauthorized transaction. "Visa's approach to agentic commerce is built around user control, transparency and security," the company said in response. "Transactions operate within user-defined permissions, including spending limits, merchant categories and approval requirements, and use tokenized credentials, real-time authorization and fraud monitoring." But experts still have concerns. "Even with strong traditional security controls like tokenization and fraud monitoring, agentic payments introduce new risks that existing systems weren't designed for -- shifting the challenge from authenticating users to governing whether agents act within intent and policy," Geoff Cairns, principal analyst at Forrester, said via email. "For consumers and businesses, the main concerns would be unauthorized or mistaken transactions, liability ambiguity, and fraud that scales faster than traditional dispute processes can respond." Visa said that for financial institutions and enterprise clients with strict security standards, tracking agent credentials across interactions helps keep them from taking unauthorized action, creating workflow efficiencies without increasing risk. Beyond that, the usual AI problems also plague agentic commerce. As the Guardian reported last week, AI shopping assistants can surface scam sites as legitimate retailers. Though the payment process itself isn't at fault here, the larger environment of AI-assisted shopping is still grappling with trust holes before a buyer even gets to checkout. So are agentic payments worth it, at least at this stage? "The convenience benefits of agentic payments don't inherently increase risk, but they shift authentication from explicit user interaction to continuous, risk-based validation, where delegated authorization and 'on behalf of' controls become central to trust," Cairns explained. "This is a technical area that is still evolving."

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.

OpenAI plugs Visa into ChatGPT for AI-agent payments

It's OpenAI's second run at commerce after Instant Checkout flopped, this time outsourcing the hard part, payments and fraud, to the world's biggest card network. There's no launch date, price, or product yet. OpenAI is wiring a payment network into ChatGPT. Under an expanded partnership announced at the Visa Payments Forum on Wednesday, AI agents inside OpenAI's products will be able to shop and pay on a user's behalf at, in principle, any of the more than 175 million merchant locations that accept Visa, once the user grants permission. The pitch is simple: tell ChatGPT to find wireless headphones under $150 or reorder paper towels, and the agent completes the purchase. Visa supplies the plumbing, tokenised card credentials bound to a specific agent, real-time authorisation, agent identification, and fraud monitoring, the same machinery it runs across more than 300 billion transactions a year. The user sets the limits: spending caps, approval thresholds, and merchant restrictions, so a human stays in command, at least at first. OpenAI's second swing at commerce This is not OpenAI's first attempt to turn ChatGPT into a checkout. Its earlier Instant Checkout, launched late last year, let the chatbot find and buy a specific item, but it leaned on a 4 per cent merchant fee that retailers balked at, saw little adoption, and was retired in March. The Visa deal offloads the part OpenAI struggled with, the trust, fraud, and dispute machinery, to a network built for exactly that. "Making the leap from having AI agents recommend what to buy to doing the purchasing requires a whole different level of trust," Visa's chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell said. It is also a land grab. Visa already runs a Trusted Agent Protocol with Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, and Worldpay; Mastercard has its rival Agent Pay; Google has Universal Cart; and Amazon is selling its own shopping AI. Even brokerages are letting agents spend. Everyone wants to own the moment an AI hits "buy". For now, though, it is more promise than product. Visa and OpenAI disclosed no launch date, no pricing, and no user interface, and gave no detail on what merchants or customers will pay. Visa's own product page spells it out: the system is "currently in the process of deployment" and the final version "may not contain all of the features described". The unresolved questions are the hard ones: who eats the loss when an agent buys the wrong thing or a user disputes a charge, how banks treat fraud claims on agent-initiated payments, and whether people will really let software check out without looking. Forestell framed the end state himself: you approve a thousand agent purchases, and then "your agent says, 'Do you want me to just not check?'" Whether shoppers say yes is the whole bet.

Visa is connecting with ChatGPT to let AI agents automatically make purchases

Is it too time-consuming for you to search for and buy products you need on the internet? ChatGPT and Visa have a solution. OpenAI and Visa, the world's largest non-Chinese payment network, have worked to integrate Visa into ChatGPT, per the Associated Press. Thanks to this integration, users can now have ChatGPT operate as a shopping agent of sorts, scouring the internet for products based on natural-language queries and making purchases on the user's behalf. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure, and seamless," said Visa executive Jack Forestell. To get an idea of how this works, one example given involved asking ChatGPT to find a new pair of headphones under a certain price threshold. Ideally, the chatbot would quickly search the internet for one, present options to the user, and complete the purchase if the user asks it to. According to Visa, some of the guardrails in place to prevent fraud or out-of-control spending include spending limits and a list of approved merchants, in addition to the basic requirement of user approval. If you trust AI to make purchases for you, this could be a godsend. If you don't, well, nobody is making you use it.

OpenAI signs major Visa deal -- so AI agents will soon be able to make payments and purchases for you

* Visa-OpenAI partnership brings agentic payments to ChatGPT, Atlas * Tokenized credentials and safeguards keep your money safe * MasterCard announced similar tech last year Visa has announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring secure payments into AI-powered and agentic ecommerce experiences, including those carried out through ChatGPT and the Atlas browser. Under this new collaboration, AI agents operating within OpenAI products will be able to initiate and complete Visa-backed transactions on behalf of users. It essentially lays the foundations for OpenAI to use agents to take care of the whole buying journey on behalf of users, including making purchases, payments and bookings. OpenAI gets new access to Visa payments It means developers and merchants will gain a new standardized way to accept agent-made Visa payments, but the payment giant stressed that safeguards would remain in place with controls like spending limits, merchant category restrictions and approval requirements all available to end users. Much like we've come to expect the additional security of Apple Pay not to share our card details, Visa will also use tokenized credentials to avoid exposing the card's finer details. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell explained. "That's the infrastructure we're building with partners like OpenAI." While we're very much in the early days of agentic payments and agentic ecommerce in general, piece-by-piece announcements risk leaving gaps in the broader ecosystem. This particular partnership puts Visa in the hands of OpenAI, but excludes other AI companies like Gemini and Claude. Other payment providers, like MasterCard and Amex, would also need to get behind similar initiatives. A year ago, MasterCard did exactly that, announcing its own Agent Pay platform as a baseline for future agentic payments. "By integrating with Visa Intelligent Commerce, we're building the infrastructure for secure, transparent, and user-controlled agentic transactions," OpenAI Head of Partnerships, Commerce Marco Mahrus added. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

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 Officially Allowing AI Agents to Go Ham With Your Credit Card

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Throw caution to the wind and forget your retirement plans. The future is now, baby, and we're letting AI agents go ham with our credit cards. On Wednesday, the payment titan Visa announced that it's integrating its payment network into ChatGPT, allowing the AI chatbot to buy stuff on your behalf, The Associated Press reports. We don't just mean putting stuff in the cart for you: with this system in place, an AI will actually be finalizing the order with your Visa card. It's a clear victory for AI companies, which have been pushing AI-powered shopping experiences on customers for over a year. The tech is already widely used for product recommendations and financial advice, but with the rise of AI agents, the likes of OpenAI have been touting the autonomous models' ability to handle the entire shopping process, from picking the actual product to handling shipping details, all from a prompt. Until now, however, few vendors accepted orders placed through ChatGPT, requiring a human to manually okay them instead. The idea seemed to run into some serious headwinds when OpenAI's Instant Checkout feature, which allowed you to place an order inside the chatbot interface, was discontinued earlier this year. But the new collaboration makes Instant Checkout seem quaint in comparison. Illustrating its potential, Visa chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell said a customer could ask the AI for a pair of wireless headphones under $150, and then the chatbot would find a pair that meets those criteria and buy it for you. "I think we're generally at a place where most people are very comfortable with the shopping aspects of it and have discovered this as a superior discovery experience," Forestell told the AP in an interview. But he acknowledged that going from an AI recommending products to one outright buying them for you "requires a whole different level of trust." The potential for abuse can't be overlooked. The scam-checking service Ask Silver recently found that ChatGPT was recommending fraudulent clones of real storefronts that steal your money and bank details. It seems inevitable that an AI given free license to shop around with your money will get duped by some sort of scam, especially as more and more of the internet is being "sloptimized" to trick chatbots into recommending products. For its part, Visa is vowing to be on top of the issue. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," Forestell told the AP.

Visa thinks it's a great idea for AI agents to shop and pay for things without human approval | Fortune

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. ChatGPT as a personal shopper Speaking at a company event Wednesday in San Francisco, 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 customer. "I think we're generally at a place where most people are very comfortable with the shopping aspects of it and have discovered this as a superior discovery experience," Forestell said in an interview. But, he added, making the leap from having AI agents recommend what to buy to doing the purchasing "just requires a whole different level of trust." "But that all comes from the underlying infrastructure, the process, the security that we build into it and the rules," he said. 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. Guardrails include spending limits, approvals 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. Forestell said Visa will handle disputes with the same essential rules it uses for any other transaction: Did the consumer really intend to make the purchase and did the merchant process it the correct way? Where it might change, he added, is if both the consumer intent and the merchant processing were done the right way, but "something happened in the middle that caused a problem." "And that's why we're modifying our whole token framework and data capture process with Visa Intelligent Commerce to make sure that problem doesn't happen," Forestell said. 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. It will take time for people to fully trust AI agents to do their shopping, Forestell acknowledged. At first, Visa expects the majority of transactions to still loop in humans, with AI agents sending a notification for consumers to approve the actual purchase. "Now, imagine you do that a thousand times over the course of some period of time," he said. "And then your agent says, 'Do you want me to just not check?'" ___ Sweet reported from New York.

OpenAI teams up with Visa to enable secure payments through AI agents

ChatGPT could soon buy things on your behalf thanks to OpenAI's new Visa partnership Imagine telling ChatGPT to reorder your paper towels or find the best wireless headphones in your budget, and it just handles the purchase without you lifting a finger. That is exactly what OpenAI and Visa are now building toward. The two companies announced a strategic partnership at the Visa Payments Forum, with plans to bring Visa's global payment infrastructure directly into OpenAI's AI agent experiences, including ChatGPT and the Atlas browser. How will ChatGPT's payment system work? The partnership is part of Visa's broader Intelligent Commerce initiative, which is designed to extend secure payment capabilities into new digital spaces. When an AI agent purchases on your behalf, Visa handles the actual transaction using tokenized card credentials, real-time authorization, and fraud monitoring. Recommended Videos Tokenization means your actual card details are never exposed during a purchase, similar to how Apple Pay keeps your card information private. You also get to set your own rules for things like spending limits, which types of merchants the agent can buy from, and whether certain purchases need your approval first. So you stay in control without having to babysit every transaction. OpenAI's second shot at commerce This isn't OpenAI's first attempt to turn ChatGPT into a checkout tool. An earlier feature called Instant Checkout, which carried a 4% merchant fee, failed to gain traction with retailers and was retired in March. This time around, OpenAI is handing the trust, fraud, and dispute side of things over to Visa, a network that already handles over 300 billion transactions a year. Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Jack Forestell, says the jump from recommending a product to actually buying it needs a completely different level of trust. That said, there is still no launch date, pricing, or even a user interface to show yet.

ChatGPT can now buy things for you after deal with payments giant Visa

Visa has embedded its payment network inside ChatGPT, letting the chatbot independently shop and complete purchases on your behalf. Payments giant Visa has embedded its network inside ChatGPT, allowing the chatbot to shop and complete transactions independently on behalf of users in a move that marks a significant expansion of AI-powered commerce. The tie-up means AI agents can not only recommend products but complete purchases at any merchant that accepts Visa. Previous attempts at this kind of technology had been confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants. OpenAI will provide the technology allowing agents to interact, make decisions and initiate purchases through ChatGPT. Visa, the world's largest payment network outside of China, will handle payment authorisation and fraud monitoring. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," said Jack Forestell, the company's chief product and strategy officer. How would it work? Speaking at a company event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Forestell gave the example of a customer asking ChatGPT to find wireless headphones under $150 (€136). The chatbot would find a suitable pair and buy it on the customer's behalf. Users would link their Visa cards to ChatGPT to enable shopping, with guardrails including spending limits, required approval steps and a list of approved merchants to protect consumers and minimise fraud. Forestell said Visa would handle disputes using the same rules it applies to any other transaction, such as making sure that the consumer intended to make the purchase and whether the merchant processed it correctly. It is not OpenAI's first attempt at e-commerce. The company launched Instant Checkout late last year, allowing ChatGPT to scour the internet for specific items. But the feature was prone to errors, was not widely adopted by merchants who balked at a 4% transaction fee and was retired in March. Visa and OpenAI did not disclose the financial terms of the new arrangement or detail any fees for merchants or customers. Will people trust it? Forestell acknowledged it will take time for consumers to fully trust AI agents to handle their shopping. He expects most early transactions to still require human approval, with agents sending notifications before completing a purchase. "I think we're generally at a place where most people are very comfortable with the shopping aspects of it," he said, adding that making the leap to autonomous purchasing "just requires a whole different level of trust." Visa's biggest rival, Mastercard, has also been developing its own AI shopping features, though on a smaller scale. Its offering targets businesses rather than consumers, allowing AI agents to procure services such as advertising on a company's behalf.

Visa partners with OpenAI to let AI agents make payments for users

Visa partners with OpenAI to let AI agents make payments for users Visa Inc. has struck a deal with OpenAI Group PBC to let artificial intelligence agents make payments for users, bringing one of the world's largest payment networks into ChatGPT's push toward agentic commerce. The companies announced the partnership at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco. Under the agreement, Visa's payment tools will be integrated into OpenAI's products, giving developers and merchants a way to accept Visa transactions initiated by AI agents rather than by a user manually checking out each time. Visa will supply the network, tokenization and risk capabilities behind the transactions. Payments will run within user-defined permissions such as spending caps, merchant categories and required approvals and will use tokenized Visa credentials with real-time authorization and fraud monitoring. Visa will also handle chargebacks and refunds. The collaboration sits within Visa Intelligent Commerce, the company's initiative for extending payment capabilities into AI-driven environments. The two companies said they will also explore enterprise uses, including developer experiences powered by OpenAI's Codex coding agent. Codex agents could eventually buy inference, application programming interfaces, or other developer services on their own, within limits a user sets. The deal is the latest sign that payments firms see agentic commerce as the next contested layer of online retail. More than one in five transactions are now "really being influenced by what they're learning through" large language models, Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth, told Axios, adding that AI is shaping buying decisions faster than the company had expected. He said the integration could eventually feel similar to paying through Apple Pay or Shop Pay. Neither company offered a launch date or said exactly how the experience will appear to consumers. The framework is designed to power agentic payments in whatever form they take, the companies said. OpenAI has tried this before. It launched Instant Checkout in September, letting people buy from Etsy merchants inside ChatGPT. The feature never caught on and OpenAI pulled back on it this year, CNBC reported in March. In November, the company tried a different tack with Shopping Research, which pulls together buyers's guides from product specs, reviews and pricing. "AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did," said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless. That's the infrastructure we're building with partners like OpenAI." Marco Mahrus, OpenAI's head of partnerships for commerce, said agents will take on a growing role in tasks that involve money, from purchases and payments to more complex transactions and that the integration is meant to keep those transactions secure, transparent and under user control.

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

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Betting that people will soon grow more comfortable having artificial intelligence agents shop for groceries, plane tickets or diapers on their behalf, payments giant Visa said Wednesday that it has embedded its payment network inside of ChatGPT, empowering the chatbot to independently shop and complete transactions. 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. ChatGPT as a personal shopper Speaking at a company event Wednesday in San Francisco, 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 customer. "I think we're generally at a place where most people are very comfortable with the shopping aspects of it and have discovered this as a superior discovery experience," Forestell said in an interview. But, he added, making the leap from having AI agents recommend what to buy to doing the purchasing "just requires a whole different level of trust." "But that all comes from the underlying infrastructure, the process, the security that we build into it and the rules," he said. 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. Guardrails include spending limits, approvals 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. Forestell said Visa will handle disputes with the same essential rules it uses for any other transaction: Did the consumer really intend to make the purchase and did the merchant process it the correct way? Where it might change, he added, is if both the consumer intent and the merchant processing were done the right way, but "something happened in the middle that caused a problem." "And that's why we're modifying our whole token framework and data capture process with Visa Intelligent Commerce to make sure that problem doesn't happen," Forestell said. 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. It will take time for people to fully trust AI agents to do their shopping, Forestell acknowledged. At first, Visa expects the majority of transactions to still loop in humans, with AI agents sending a notification for consumers to approve the actual purchase. "Now, imagine you do that a thousand times over the course of some period of time," he said. "And then your agent says, 'Do you want me to just not check?'" ___ Sweet reported from New York.

What happens when ChatGPT can shop for you? Inside Visa and OpenAI's AI commerce vision

Visa's partnership with OpenAI could mark the beginning of a new phase in digital commerce, where AI assistants move beyond product recommendations to actively participate in transactions. As intelligent agents become more involved in purchasing decisions, businesses may need to rethink how products are marketed, discovered, and evaluated in an increasingly AI-driven marketplace. Visa's partnership with OpenAI aims to bring purchasing capabilities to ChatGPT. It will not just recommend a product, it will search for it, compare options and purchase it, all within the preferred direction and spending limit set by the consumer. This development marks one of the most significant shifts in the E-commerce industry since the arrival of digital payments. It also raises a question that retailers, marketers and businesses cannot afford to ignore. What happens to the sales of a product when its quality, demand and desirability are no longer judged by a human, but a chatbot? The process, however, is simpler than it sounds. The transaction system works on a tokenisation principle that Visa has built specifically for such agentic AI environments. Once ChatGPT finds a product that matches the buyer's said description, instead of sharing the user's card details, Visa generates a single-use payment token that directly travels to the merchant system and expires the moment the transaction is complete, eliminating any risk of the payment details being misused or exposed. The user's autonomy remains where it belongs, with the consumer. OpenAI's ChatGPT has millions of users globally. Visa operates the world's largest payment network. The integration of a conversational AI system into a well established payment network at this scale, is one of its kind. Agentic AI, where a system not only responds but completes tasks on behalf of a user, is moving from a concept to commercial reality. This partnership signals a global shift in making day-to-day functioning easier for customers. The implications extend well into the broader retail ecosystem. The emergence of AI-assisted shopping won't be influenced by advertising campaigns, PR or visibility. It will prioritise data. Pricing transparency, reliable delivery, and customer satisfaction will become the deciding factor. Interestingly, for businesses, this is not a setback. In fact it reconfirms the credibility of their product, if the quality was always there to begin with. The shift also changes the way SEO will be understood and integrated by the businesses. It also establishes the difference between the way to reach an AI buyer and a human buyer. A human buyer responds to visibility and emotion. An AI buyer responds to data. For businesses, the next frontier is not search engine optimisation. It is language model optimisation. The collaboration between Visa and OpenAI not only sparks a debate about how a product should be sold but also redefines what a buyer means. For the first time, the buying journey is no longer exclusive to human decision making. Commerce has always evolved around the buyer. Now the buyer is evolving too. Disclaimer Statement: This content is authored by a 3rd party. The views expressed here are that of the respective authors/ entities and do not represent the views of Economic Times (ET). ET does not guarantee, vouch for or endorse any of its contents nor is responsible for them in any manner whatsoever. Please take all steps necessary to ascertain that any information and content provided is correct, updated, and verified. ET hereby disclaims any and all warranties, express or implied, relating to the report and any content therein.

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

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. 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 ecommerce. 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 authorisation 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 customer. 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 authorise 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 minimise fraud. Retailers have introduced shopping assistants powered by AI that can recommend products and personalise 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 authorisation to purchase services from web and ad providers in order for the coffee shop to build out its campaign.

Visa Launches AI and Stablecoin Tools to Power 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 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 and OpenAI Partner on AI Agent Payments

You can access the original blog from here. Visa and OpenAI have announced a partnership to allow AI agents to make payments and complete purchases on behalf of users, marking a step toward what the companies describe as "agentic commerce." The collaboration, unveiled at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, will integrate Visa's payment infrastructure into OpenAI's products, enabling AI agents to handle transactions while operating within user-defined limits such as spending caps, merchant restrictions, and approval requirements. How the partnership will work: Under the arrangement, Visa will provide payment tokenization, transaction authorization, fraud monitoring and agent identification systems for payments initiated through OpenAI-powered services. The companies said transactions will use tokenized Visa credentials instead of exposing card details directly. Part of Visa's broader AI strategy: The move builds on Visa's broader push into AI-powered payments. In 2025, the company launched Visa Intelligent Commerce, a platform that enables AI agents to search, select and buy products using tokenized payment credentials. Earlier this year, Visa also introduced AI tools to handle credit card disputes, saying it processed more than 106 million disputes globally in 2025. The OpenAI partnership extends those efforts into one of the world's largest AI platforms. Beyond consumer payments: Beyond consumer purchases, the companies said they will explore additional uses for payments within OpenAI's ecosystem, including developer-focused applications linked to Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, and automated business workflows involving procurement, invoicing, reconciliation, and payment execution. Questions around AI-led transactions: As developers increasingly design AI systems to perform actions rather than simply provide information, this shift raises questions around transaction authorization, user control, agent identity, and fraud prevention. "AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did," said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Visa. "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," said Marco Mahrus, Head of Partnerships, Commerce at OpenAI. The companies did not announce a launch timeline or specify when payment-enabled AI agents will become broadly available to consumers.

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.