Visa plugs its payment network into ChatGPT, letting AI agents shop and
pay for users
[June 11, 2026] By
BARBARA ORTUTAY and KEN SWEET
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Betting that people will soon grow more comfortable
having artificial intelligence agents shop for groceries, plane tickets
or diapers on their behalf, payments giant Visa said Wednesday that it
has embedded its payment network inside of ChatGPT, empowering the
chatbot to independently shop and complete transactions.
It means AI agents can not only recommend products but complete the
purchase on the user’s behalf at potentially any merchant that accepts
Visa. The payment network's previous attempts at this technological leap
were confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants.
It is not OpenAI’s first attempt at e-commerce. The company late last
year announced Instant Checkout, which allowed ChatGPT to scour the
internet for a specific item like a digital personal shopper. But the
process was prone to errors and was not widely adopted by merchants due
to the fee that OpenAI was charging merchants. The company retired
Instant Checkout in March.
Visa’s collaboration is different from OpenAI’s previous attempts, as it
will allow users to link their Visa cards to ChatGPT to shop and make it
easier for merchants to accept transactions initiated by agents.
OpenAI will provide the technology to allow agents to interact, make
decisions and initiate purchases through ChatGPT. Visa, the world’s
largest payment network outside of China, will provide the payment
authorization and fraud monitoring needed to do this at scale.
“As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s focus is
to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless,” said Jack
Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa.
ChatGPT as a personal shopper
Speaking at a company event Wednesday in San Francisco, Forestell gave
an example of a customer telling ChatGPT they're looking for a pair of
wireless headphones under $150. The chatbot would find a pair for sale
under those parameters and buy it on behalf of the customer.
“I think we're generally at a place where most people are very
comfortable with the shopping aspects of it and have discovered this as
a superior discovery experience,” Forestell said in an interview. But,
he added, making the leap from having AI agents recommend what to buy to
doing the purchasing “just requires a whole different level of trust.”
“But that all comes from the underlying infrastructure, the process, the
security that we build into it and the rules,” he said.
Visa and OpenAI did not disclose the financial terms of the
collaboration and did not give details on the fees merchants or
customers would have to pay.
Instant Checkout charged merchants 4% of the transaction's value, which
merchants saw as being too expensive.
[to top of second column] |
Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer, speaks at
the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco on Wednesday, June 10,
2026. (AP Photo/Barbara Ortutay)
 Guardrails include spending
limits, approvals
Allowing AI agents to buy products on behalf of a consumer raises
concerns for both banks and retailers. A customer could overspend,
or the agent buys the wrong item, or the customer claims they did
not authorize that transaction. Banks have been concerned about
potential fraud claims that could occur when an agent uses a bank
customer’s credit or debit card.
Visa says the feature will have guardrails like
spending limits, required approval steps and approved merchants for
shopping in order to protect consumers and minimize fraud.
Forestell said Visa will handle disputes with the same essential
rules it uses for any other transaction: Did the consumer really
intend to make the purchase and did the merchant process it the
correct way? Where it might change, he added, is if both the
consumer intent and the merchant processing were done the right way,
but “something happened in the middle that caused a problem.”
“And that’s why we’re modifying our whole token framework and data
capture process with Visa Intelligent Commerce to make sure that
problem doesn’t happen,” Forestell said.
Retailers have introduced shopping assistants powered by AI that can
recommend products and personalize the customer's shopping
experience, with the earliest iterations of those experiments being
Amazon’s Alexa. But Alexa could only shop on Amazon, and OpenAI's
Instant Checkout feature was limited to select merchants.
Visa’s biggest competitor, Mastercard, has also been introducing its
own AI-shopping features to its payment network on a smaller scale.
Mastercard announced that AI agents will have the capability to
procure services on behalf of a business. For example, a coffee shop
wants to start an advertising campaign as part of a launch, so it
gives an AI agent the authorization to purchase services from web
and ad providers in order for the coffee shop to build out its
campaign.
It will take time for people to fully trust AI agents to do their
shopping, Forestell acknowledged. At first, Visa expects the
majority of transactions to still loop in humans, with AI agents
sending a notification for consumers to approve the actual purchase.
“Now, imagine you do that a thousand times over the course of some
period of time,” he said. “And then your agent says, ‘Do you want me
to just not check?’”
___
Sweet reported from New York.
All contents © copyright 2026 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
