Visa and OpenAI have launched a strategic collaboration to enable secure payments in the artificial intelligence company’s ecosystem of tools. The objective is to boost the consumer experience in so-called “agent commerce” environments, that is, that which happens on platforms such as ChatGPT, and provide fluid and trustworthy payment processes.
As announced during the Visa Payments Forum held in San Francisco, the alliance means that Visa’s payment, credentialing and security capabilities will be integrated into OpenAI experiences with the intention of facilitating secure transactions for consumers and businesses. The intention, say the entities, is to advance towards the next generation of commerce with artificial intelligence.
Transactions using the Visa network will be subject to user-defined permissions and controls
All of this means that consumers who use OpenAI AI bots to purchase products will benefit from Visa’s network security, security infrastructure, and authentication capabilities. Likewise, AI transactions using the Visa network will be subject to user-defined permissions and controls, including spending limits, real-time authorization and fraud monitoring.
From the agreement it is inferred that both companies see a near future in which artificial intelligence agents will play an active role in the purchase of everyday products and services, such as food or plane tickets. The idea is that these tools can complete purchase processes on behalf of users in those businesses that accept Visa.
Until now, OpenAI’s advances in payments have been limited to a single retailer or a small group of registered merchants. Late last year, OpenAI announced Instant Checkout, which would allow users to search for products and purchase them directly through the chatbot. However, the functionality was withdrawn in March due to the complexity of deploying it at scale and the fees it involved for merchants.
Visa’s integration joins that of PayPal, which at the end of last year announced the integration of its digital wallet within ChatGPT allowing users to make purchases directly from the conversational environment using cards, bank accounts or PayPal balance, and benefit from buyer protections, order tracking and dispute resolution.
On the other hand, and as explained by Visa, the collaboration will offer developers and businesses a simpler way to accept Visa payments initiated by agents. Additionally, the companies will jointly explore enterprise applications using OpenAI’s Codex coding assistant, as well as more automated and conversational workflows as AI gains weight in digital interactions.
“Artificial intelligence will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology did“said Bea Larregle, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Visa in Southern Europe, in a statement. “As AI agents become active participants in the economy, our goal is to ensure that every transaction is secure, reliable and seamless.“.
According to OpenIA, the market is entering a new era in which commerce will occur in many more spaces and in many more ways than today. “We are building the infrastructure necessary to enable secure, transparent and user-controlled agent transactions“; explained Marco Mahrus, Head of Partnerships, Commerce at OpenAI. “In this way, we help people harness the full potential of artificial intelligence agents with the confidence that their payments are handled securely.”.
Improvements in tokens and stablecoins
The collaboration is part of the Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative, focused on extending secure payment capabilities to new digital environments. Thus, along with the collaboration with OpenAI, the company has also announced new AI functionalities, stablecoins and tokens to help facilitate the adoption of agentic commerce.
In this sense, it launches Agent Score, a scoring system for businesses to evaluate the readiness of their websites for commerce with AI agents; and Agent Directory, a directory of trusted and Visa-verified agents for transactions. It has also launched AI models trained with millions of transactions to improve, among other things, fraud detection.
Visa will improve tokenization to add more data, context and security to credentials
On the other hand, the company has also announced improvements in its tokenization in order to incorporate more data, context and security to the credentials used in digital commerce. Visa notes that as commerce expands to new channels and agents, it will enrich the token data to provide more details about the type of transaction, where they have been used and who is making the payment.
The new functionalities are presented in a context in which spending on artificial intelligence is becoming synonymous with productivity in some environments. It is the phenomenon known as “tokenmaxxing”, and consists, among other things, of maximizing the consumption of artificial intelligence tokens as a sign of technical sophistication, cultural alignment and performance.
In addition, Visa will also promote the modernization of money transfer management with stablecoins and blockchain-based infrastructure. Among other things, it has announced the development of tokenized deposits, which will allow banks to convert traditional deposits into digital money; or the expansion of stablecoin settlement to various regions, blockchains and currencies; or its stablecoin-linked card programs, allowing consumers and businesses to spend their stablecoin balances anywhere Visa is accepted.
