Artificial intelligence “agents” are supposed to be more than chatbots. The tech industry has spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf.
So far, they are not doing much.
Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents – successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers – could find and buy you a jumper, weekly groceries or an aeroplane ticket.
“We think this could be really important,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”
Visa announced last month that it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers – among them Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Mistral – to connect their AI systems to Visa’s payments network.
