Key Takeaways
- Visa is partnering with major AI companies to let AI “agents” make purchases using your credit card.
- The goal is for AI assistants, more advanced than current chatbots, to shop for you based on your budget and preferences.
- Visa believes this could revolutionize online shopping, similar to the impact of e-commerce itself.
- Partners include developers like Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Mistral.
The tech world is buzzing about artificial intelligence “agents” – think personal assistants smarter than the chatbots we know today.
While the promise is assistants that can manage real tasks for you, they haven’t quite lived up to that hype yet.
Visa aims to change this by connecting these AI agents to its payment network. Imagine telling your AI to buy groceries or find a specific sweater within your budget, and it handles the purchase.
This concept involves setting spending limits and preferences, then letting AI agents, powered by technology from companies like OpenAI and Microsoft, do the shopping.
Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, described the potential impact as huge, possibly “transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself,” according to the South China Morning Post.
To make this happen, Visa announced collaborations last month with several leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Mistral, integrating their systems with Visa’s payment capabilities.
