Visa and OpenAI: AI Joins Your Daily Shopping

Visa and OpenAI recently announced an innovative partnership aimed at integrating Visa's payment network into ChatGPT, OpenAI's conversational agent. This collaboration now allows an artificial intelligence agent to make purchases on behalf of the user, without the need for manual entry of a card number. Users can set spending limits in advance and choose the categories of merchants allowed, which delineates the transactions the agent can perform.

For each transaction, Visa uses a tokenized version of the actual card number, a tokenization process already applied to its 300 billion annual transactions. This announcement was made at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco. To use this service, ChatGPT users must link their Visa card, set spending limits, and choose whether manual confirmation is required for each purchase. Visa then handles real-time authorization and fraud monitoring, while OpenAI manages product searches.

Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer, stated that artificial intelligence could transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile phones. By September 2025, ChatGPT had already introduced an instant payment system via Stripe, available for Etsy and Shopify merchants in the United States. Visa is now extending this capability to its global network of merchants.

Starting in March 2026, Visa has integrated over twenty European banks into its agent-based payment tests. The "Visa Agentic Ready" certification program has been launched for issuing banks, with participants including Barclays, Commerzbank, Banco Santander, Revolut, HSBC UK, and Raiffeisen Bank International. These institutions are testing agent-triggered transactions in controlled production environments, in collaboration with Visa and selected merchants.

Visa chose to begin in Europe due to the extent of tokenization and the enhanced authentication frameworks already in place. Rubail Birwadker, Senior Vice President of Growth Products at Visa, indicated that agent-based transactions were already underway in the United States, and the program would subsequently expand to the Asia-Pacific and Latin America, with an additional 85 partners.

For participating banks, the goal is to ensure that their authorization systems can distinguish an agent-triggered transaction from a human transaction, while ensuring that consent mechanisms cover every step of the payment process.

Enterprise Applications and Integration

The partnership between Visa and OpenAI is not limited to consumer purchases via ChatGPT. The two companies are also working on enterprise applications through Codex, OpenAI's programming agent. This includes integrating payment primitives and agent identity signals into automated workflows, accessible to developers to create their own applications.

For example, financial management software developed with Codex could trigger vendor payments based on predefined rules. For merchants, integration with the Visa network via OpenAI offers a new sales channel, allowing buyers to delegate their searches to an agent rather than navigating the sites themselves. Marco Mahrus, Head of Commerce Partnerships at OpenAI, stated that agents will play an increasingly significant role in payments, with the goal of building an agent-based transaction infrastructure under user control.

Visa has over 100 partners in its Intelligent Commerce program. Mastercard has launched a competing technology called Agent Pay, while PayPal unveiled its own agent-based commerce services in October 2025. Meanwhile, Coinbase is developing the x402 protocol, allowing AI agents to pay each other using stablecoins.