The payments giant Visa announced this Wednesday a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to integrate its payment network into ChatGPT, allowing artificial intelligence agents not only to recommend products, but also to complete purchases autonomously on the user’s behalf. The announcement was made at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco.
The alliance means that users will be able to link their Visa cards to ChatGPT, set spending limits and preferences, and delegate to an AI agent the task of searching for, selecting and purchasing products or services at any merchant that accepts Visa. Until now, the company’s previous attempts were limited to specific retailers or a small group of participating merchants.
How it works
OpenAI provides the agent technology that interacts, makes decisions and initiates purchases through ChatGPT. Visa, for its part, provides all the payments infrastructure: real-time authorization, fraud monitoring, credential tokenization and management of disputes and refunds. Transactions operate within user-defined permissions, such as spending limits, authorized merchant categories and mandatory approval steps.
Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, gave an example during the event: a customer tells ChatGPT that they are looking for wireless headphones for under 150 dollars; the chatbot finds a model that meets the requirements and buys it without manual intervention. «As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s goal is to ensure that transactions are reliable, secure and seamless,» he said.
Security and protections
Visa assures that the feature incorporates multiple layers of protection: configurable spending limits, mandatory approval steps before completing the purchase, and lists of authorized merchants. Transactions use tokenized credentials —not real card numbers— with real-time authorization and anti-fraud monitoring. In an initial phase, most transactions are expected to still require human confirmation, with the possibility that the agent learns when it can do without it over time.
The collaboration is part of the Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative, focused on extending secure payments to new digital environments. Beyond consumer spending, both companies will explore enterprise applications, including experiences powered by Codex, OpenAI’s programming assistant, where agents could autonomously purchase API services, inference and other development resources under predefined limits.
Context and challenges
This is not OpenAI’s first attempt at e-commerce. At the end of 2025 it launched Instant Checkout, which allowed ChatGPT to buy products by tracking the internet, but it proved error-prone and charged merchants a 4% commission, which hampered its adoption and led to its withdrawal in March 2026. The integration with Visa differs substantially because it leverages the already existing payment network, with its anti-fraud infrastructure and its global reach (more than 100 million merchants accept Visa worldwide).
However, the proposal is not without questions. Allowing AI agents to buy products on behalf of the consumer raises doubts for both banks and merchants: who is responsible if the agent buys the wrong product? Can the consumer claim they did not authorize the transaction? How are returns managed? Visa says dispute processes will essentially follow the same rules as any other transaction, but acknowledges they will need to be adapted for cases where intent and processing were correct but « something happened in between that caused a problem ».
Visa’s move adds to an unstoppable trend. Its main competitor, Mastercard, has also carried out pilots in India and Europe, while entities such as ING recently completed the first full agentic transaction over the Mastercard network. Consulting firm Gartner estimates that by 2028, 25% of everyday commercial transactions could be mediated by AI agents.
Sources: Visa Newsroom, La Vanguardia, SiliconANGLE, ABC News.
