Agents with expense accounts? How AI may soon access your Visa card data

Visa is pioneering a significant shift in electronic payments by connecting its vast financial network directly with AI agent technology. Through partnerships with leading AI developers like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic, Visa aims to enable autonomous AI models to handle consumer transactions based on user preferences and budget constraints. This development represents a major step toward AI-mediated commerce that could fundamentally change how consumers interact with financial services.

The big picture: Visa’s “Intelligent Commerce” initiative connects its payment infrastructure directly to AI systems from major tech companies, allowing AI agents to make purchases without human intervention.

• After six months of development, Visa has assembled an impressive roster of partners including OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Samsung, and Stripe.
• The company envisions AI agents handling everything from routine grocery shopping to complex travel bookings, based on consumer preferences and authorized parameters.

Key details: Visa plans to implement “AI-ready cards” that use tokenized digital credentials rather than traditional credit card information.

• The company emphasizes that “only the consumer can instruct the agent on what to do and when to activate a payment credential,” suggesting safeguards will be in place.
• Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product officer, positions this shift as equivalent to the transitions from physical to online shopping and from online to mobile commerce.

Why this matters: Financial integration with AI agents represents a significant expansion of artificial intelligence into everyday consumer transactions.

• The initiative could streamline routine purchases and complex buying decisions while providing AI developers with valuable consumer preference data.
• Competitor Mastercard announced a similar “Agent Pay” initiative just a day earlier, indicating a broader industry push toward AI-mediated financial services.

Potential challenges: Early AI shopping assistants have shown significant limitations that raise questions about consumer adoption.

• OpenAI’s “Operator” agent has been criticized for being slow and requiring constant human supervision for passwords, credit card information, and purchase approvals.
• Visa’s integration aims to solve these problems by handling the payment infrastructure that “AI platforms can’t solve by themselves,” according to Forestell.

Behind the numbers: AI companies are motivated to partner with Visa partly to gain access to valuable consumer transaction data.

• Perplexity’s chief business officer noted that “Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,” which could enhance personalized recommendations.
• This transaction data would reveal “revealed preferences” that could improve AI shopping and recommendation capabilities.