Visa lets OpenAI's AI agents make purchases on users' behalf

Visa announced a partnership with OpenAI at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco. The Visa payment network is integrated directly into ChatGPT, giving AI agents built-in access to make payments and complete purchases on a user's behalf.

How agents will pay

Until now, AI could only gather information: find a product, compare prices, read reviews. Now it crosses the final line and pays for the purchase on its own. When an agent completes a task and reaches the payment step, it initiates a payment through the Visa API built into ChatGPT. The user receives a confirmation request and approves it, and the transaction goes through in real time. For the person, this is simpler: there is no need to enter a card number or look up payment details.

What agents will be able to do

The core of the partnership is to cover a whole class of shopping tasks:

• Order food and goods through DoorDash, Amazon and local marketplaces
• Book tickets for planes, trains and buses
• Buy tickets to movies, theater and concerts
• Pay for subscriptions: Netflix, Spotify, cloud services, SaaS
• Order taxis and food delivery on the spot, right in the chat
• Compare prices and automatically pick the cheapest option

In each scenario, the agent picks the best option and completes the deal, saving the user time.

What remains unknown

Visa and OpenAI have not yet disclosed the financial terms. Neither the size of the fees nor who pays them is known. Questions remain about transaction limits, how 3D Secure works and geographic coverage. It may be available only to Pro subscribers, or in all regions at once.

What this means

This is a practical step toward a world where AI agents become full participants in e-commerce. Visa is betting that people will soon more often ask an agent to "find and buy" rather than "find and tell me." For e-commerce, this means more and more purchases will be initiated by machines rather than by people.