Visa develops AI-powered cards for seamless automated purchases

Visa’s new initiative aims to revolutionize how people shop by empowering AI agents to make purchases on behalf of consumers. This development marks a significant shift in commerce, comparable to the transitions from physical to online shopping and from online to mobile shopping. By opening its payment network to developers building AI shopping experiences, Visa is positioning itself at the forefront of commerce’s next evolution, where AI agents will increasingly handle shopping tasks from browsing to purchasing.

The big picture: Visa has launched “Visa Intelligent Commerce,” a commercial partner program that provides developers with integrated APIs to build AI-powered shopping experiences that can complete transactions on users’ behalf.

• The initiative comes as consumers increasingly rely on AI to streamline their shopping experiences, with major companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI already implementing AI shopping features in their chatbots.
• The program represents a significant advancement in the evolution of AI commerce by addressing the payment friction that exists even in current AI shopping experiences.

Key components: The Visa Intelligent Commerce program offers three core capabilities designed to enable secure AI-powered shopping.

• AI-ready credit cards that replace traditional card details with tokenized digital credentials, enhancing security for AI transactions.
• AI-powered personalization that shares Visa spend and purchase insights (with user consent) to improve agent performance.
• AI payments functionality that allows AI agents to complete transactions within guidelines established by users.

Industry collaboration: Visa is partnering with numerous AI technology leaders to implement its vision for AI-powered commerce.

• The company’s collaborators include Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, OpenAI, Perplexity, Samsung, and Stripe, among others.
• Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, emphasized that AI agents will need to establish trust not only with users but also with banks and sellers.

Competitive landscape: Visa isn’t alone in preparing for the era of agentic commerce.

• Mastercard announced “Mastercard Agent Pay” just one day before Visa’s announcement, introducing similar capabilities including Mastercard Agentic Tokens.
• Mastercard’s initiative includes a partnership with Microsoft specifically focused on developing new use cases and scaling agentic commerce solutions.