The Blubber

Visa wants to reshape the way people shop — by letting AI spend on your behalf. By setting a spending limit and a few preferences, next-generation AI assistants — evolving from tools like ChatGPT — could soon handle everyday purchases for you, whether it’s groceries, clothes, or even plane tickets.

“This has the potential to be truly game-changing — on par with the rise of e-commerce,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview.

On Wednesday, Visa announced partnerships with several prominent AI firms — including Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and French startup Mistral — to link their AI platforms to Visa’s global payment infrastructure. Other collaborators include IBM, Stripe, and Samsung. Pilot programs begin this week, with broader adoption expected in 2026.

The San Francisco-based payments giant is betting that today’s science-fiction-like tech could soon become a practical solution for automating everyday purchases. Over the past six months, Visa has been working closely with AI developers to overcome the technical hurdles standing between these agents and widespread consumer use.

For up-and-coming AI companies, Visa’s support may provide a critical edge in challenging dominant players like Amazon and Google — both of which are building their own AI-powered shopping tools.

While many companies are showcasing demos of what’s known as “agentic AI” — intelligent systems designed to take action on a user’s behalf — few are fully operational in real-world scenarios. Most current offerings are still based on large language models that can generate text, answer questions, and suggest products, but they often fall short when it comes to completing transactions.

“As it stands, early versions of shopping agents are getting pretty good at finding things for you,” Forestell explained. “But when it’s time to pay, the systems often stop and hand it back to the user — saying, ‘Now you go buy it.’”

Visa believes it can bridge that gap by offering a secure, streamlined way for these AI agents to access and use funds — helping bring autonomous purchasing from theory into everyday reality.