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?’”

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Sweet reported from New York.