Visa is partnering with tech heavyweights, including Microsoft and OpenAI, to roll out a new platform that allows users to delegate their online shopping tasks to AI agents. While users will set spending limits, the AI agents will handle the rest—searching for products, booking vacations, or ordering groceries, the payments processor stated in a recent announcement. Digital commerce companies often strive to minimize the time between consumers selecting a product and making a payment to prevent them from abandoning their purchases midway.
“As new ways to pay emerge, they need to run on a network that is always on – that is safe, secure, scalable and relentlessly innovating,” said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney. “We are taking the power of our network and our decades-long expertise to bring new products and solutions that will transform commerce and bring trust and security to AI-enabled payments.”
Shorter checkout times in post-pandemic era
Shorter checkout times have become even more crucial since the COVID-19 pandemic, when many users shifted to online shopping. A 2020 study by Experian found that one in three customers were only willing to wait 30 seconds or less before abandoning an online transaction. Visa’s new platform, Visa Intelligent Commerce, could help reduce friction by allowing AI to manage routine tasks while customers make the final call. This smoother shopping experience could encourage increased spending.
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AI agents transforming online shopping landscape
AI agents are systems designed to act autonomously to perform specific tasks. Unlike chatbots, these agents do not require constant human input. They are expected to play a larger role in businesses’ AI strategies in the future. An analysis by Boston Consulting Group projects the market could grow at an average annual rate of 45 percent from 2024 to 2030. Besides Microsoft and OpenAI, Visa is also collaborating with Anthropic, IBM, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Samsung, and Stripe.
Over the past 25 years, Visa’s network has processed 3.3 trillion transactions. Visa plans to extend the infrastructure, standards, and capabilities currently present in physical and digital commerce to AI commerce. Soon, consumers will enable AI agents via AI platforms to use a Visa credential (of which there are 4.8 billion today) at any accepting merchant location (currently totaling over 150 million) for any payment use case.
Empowering consumers through AI-enabled payments
“Historically, Visa has used AI to protect consumers, harnessing it to help combat fraud. Now, we will also enable AI to empower consumers, fundamentally shifting digital commerce to make it more personal, more relevant, and more delightful,” added McInerney. “For any AI commerce use case to take hold, the payment is a critical enabler of success. If there is no payment, there is no commerce. That’s the expertise and trust that Visa brings.”
“We see tremendous potential for the role AI agents will play in commerce, from streamlining ‘regular’ transaction-driven tasks such as ordering groceries to more sophisticated search and decision-making like securing that hard-to-get restaurant reservation or concert ticket,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer. “This will be a transformative change, bringing more magic and convenience to the consumer experience and creating a new world that will forever change how we shop and buy.”
