SAN FRANCISCO— 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 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 I 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.
Bringing Scale
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,” Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said in a statement.
Example Shared
Speaking at a company event 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.
Terms Not Released
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.
