--- title: "Visa Announces Plans to Give AI Agents Your Credit Card Information" description: "Credit card giant Visa is teaming up with AI companies to create its own AI agent that can make purchases on your behalf." date: "2025-05-03" modified: "2025-05-03" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/visa-ai-agents-your-credit-card" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" tags: - "credit cards" - "Visa" --- # Visa Announces Plans to Give AI Agents Your Credit Card Information ![Credit card giant Visa is teaming up with AI companies to create its own AI agent that can make purchases on your behalf.]() *\Image: Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty / Futurism\* Visa — yes, the multinational credit card titan — is wading into the world of AI agents. On Wednesday, the finance monolith [announced]() it would be teaming up with some of the AI industry's leading developers to connect its vast payments network to their AI systems. The end game? Letting an autonomous AI model — an agent, in the parlance — control your credit card to make purchases ranging from groceries to clothing on its own, based on your budget and preferences. "Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf," Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer, said [in a release](). "Just like the shift from physical shopping to online, and from online to mobile, Visa is setting a new standard for a new era of commerce," he added. Visa is calling the initiative, which it has been working on for the past six months, "Visa Intelligent Commerce." Among its murderer's row of AI developers are OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Mistral — along with other big names in tech like IBM, Samsung, and payment company Stripe. Envisioning a near future in which "millions of people will soon rely on AI to find the perfect sweater, research a new vacation spot or fulfill their grocery list," Visa says it will offer AI-ready cards that ditch traditional credit card details in favor of "tokenized digital credentials," which it says will be more secure. "Only the consumer can instruct the agent on what to do and when to activate a payment credential," the company emphasized in its release. Per [the ]()*[Associated Press](),* Forestell imagines that customers will use AI agents to perform routine errands like shop for groceries or handle complicated purchases like travel bookings. But he doesn't think it'll supplant other shopping experiences that we actually enjoy, like buying luxury goods, instead taking a secondary, advice-giving role. However the AI agents are used, this is predicated on customers trusting a technology which is infamously error-prone and fraught with security risks with their sensitive financial records. Not to mention the AI developers themselves: it's access to this valuable credit card information, like your past purchases — with your consent — that's wooed AI companies to work with Visa. "Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us," Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer, told the *AP*. "When we generate a recommendation — say you're asking, 'What are the best laptops?' — we would know what are other transactions you've made and the revealed preferences from that." There's clearly blood in the water. Mastercard [announced]() its own AI agent initiative on Tuesday, called "Agent Pay," featuring some of the same collaborators including Microsoft, OpenAI, and IBM. Like Visa's, the Mastercard AI agent will be able to make recommendations through conversational interactions and pull the trigger on purchases. It remains to be seen how these AI-credit-card crossovers will work in practice. The glimpses of AI agent shopping so far haven't been very impressive. Users of OpenAI's "Operator" AI agent complained that it can be excruciatingly slow while performing tasks like buying groceries or ordering takeout. It also has to be [constantly babysat](), and needs a human to enter passwords and credit card info, and to ultimately approve purchases. Of course, that's before Visa entered the picture. Its hope is that its collaboration with tech companies will enable to the AI agents to actually make the purchases by themselves, without needing a human to step in. "The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell told *AP*. "That’s why we started working with them." **More on AI:** *[ChatGPT Is Already Bungling Product Recommendations]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()