Visa (V) is experimenting with letting artificial intelligence (A.I.) agents shop and pay for items on behalf of human users.
The credit card giant is assuming that people will soon grow comfortable with having A.I. models shop for their groceries, airline tickets, and other items.
As such, Visa has embedded its payment network inside of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, giving the chatbot the power to independently shop and complete transactions for consumers.
An A.I. agent is an autonomous software system that uses artificial intelligence to achieve a specific goal.
Unlike most current chatbots, an A.I. agent can reason, make decisions, and use external tools to complete complex tasks without any human involvement, including shopping.
Visa says that its goal is to ensure that A.I. agents can not only recommend products but complete purchases on behalf of users at any merchant that accepts its credit cards.
Late last year, Visa announced “Instant Checkout,” which allowed ChatGPT to scour the internet for a specific item and function as a digital personal shopper for people.
However, Instant Checkout was prone to errors and was not widely adopted by consumers. Visa ended Instant Checkout in March of this year.
But Visa isn’t giving up on A.I. The company says its new collaboration allows users to link their Visa cards to ChatGPT to shop, and enables merchants to accept transactions initiated by agents.
V stock has declined 14% over the last 12 months to trade at $322.96 U.S. per share.
