Visa and Mastercard Will Let AI Shopping Bots Spend Your Money for You

Key Takeaways

• Visa and Mastercard Will have unveiled new platforms to power AI payments
• Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay will let AI agents initiate payments.
• AI developers, including Microsoft and OpenAI, are already working on integrating the technology into their AI platforms.

Visa and Mastercard this week unveiled new technology platforms that will enable AI agents to make payments.

Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay’s AI personal shoppers will be able to search for deals, compare prices and make purchases on users’ behalf.

Some of the biggest names in AI are already working to deploy the technology.

Visa and Mastercard Advance AI Payments

Thanks to advances in AI computer use, platforms like ChatGPT can perform an increasingly wide range of tasks.

For example, OpenAI’s Operator can fill out forms, order groceries and make restaurant reservations.

For security reasons, these platforms tend to draw a line at automating payments, and typically ask users to take over when they need to input sensitive information like passwords and card details.

Now, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay can replace card details with tokenized digital credentials. These confirm that a consumer’s chosen agent is allowed to initiate payments on their behalf.

AI Personal Shoppers Are Coming

Potential use cases for the new technology include AI personal shoppers that can automatically search for and purchase products at the best prices.

While tools like Amazon’s Alexa Shopping Service are limited to a single platform, in the future, AI assistants will be able to purchase anything that can be paid for with a Visa or Mastercard.

Beyond automated purchases, the new technology could enable AI platforms to analyze past transaction data to create personalized recommendations. Even without direct access to financial data, this trend is already being driven by advertisers and e-commerce companies.

AI Developers Explore Use Cases

To enable “personalized, secure AI commerce on a global scale,” Visa said it is already working with Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral, OpenAI and Perplexity and Samsung.

“We’re working with companies at the forefront of AI innovation to encourage AI platform participation and support new ways to pay,” said Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Jack Forestell.

Meanwhile, Mastercard said it would “collaborate with Microsoft on new use cases to scale agentic commerce, with other leading AI platforms to follow.”

Both card scheme operators have also tapped IBM to help develop AI payment solutions.

Mastercard specifically mentioned IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate—a productivity solution businesses use to automate various workflows.

By incorporating AI payments into platforms like IBM’s, agents could streamline procurement processes by managing subscriptions, reordering supplies and handling invoices.