Visa is betting that the future of online shopping involves you doing less of it yourself. The payments giant has partnered with OpenAI as part of a broader initiative called “Visa Intelligent Commerce,” designed to let AI agents discover products, make purchasing decisions, and execute transactions autonomously on behalf of consumers.
The initiative, branded “Find and Buy with AI,” doesn’t just pair Visa with OpenAI. It assembles a who’s-who of tech heavyweights: Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Stripe, and Samsung are all part of the collaboration.
What Visa is actually building
The Visa Intelligent Commerce framework integrates tokenized credentials and agent-specific APIs to create secure pathways for AI-driven transactions. Visa is giving AI agents their own secure payment credentials, complete with authentication protocols and spending limits set by the human consumer.
The system relies on tokenization, which replaces sensitive card details with unique digital tokens. Each AI agent would authenticate through Visa’s infrastructure, adhere to consumer-defined security preferences, and execute purchases within pre-set boundaries.
