Visa company presented a new initiative that could fundamentally change the way shopping is done: it’s about empowering artificial intelligence to conduct financial transactions on behalf of users.
As part of pilot programs, Visa is already testing the integration of its payment infrastructure with AI platforms from companies such as Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity and Mistral. A full launch is expected in the near future.
The project, called Visa Intelligent Commerce, aims to solve the key problem of digital assistants — the possibility of secure payment without the user’s participation. Despite the fact that AI already knows how to select goods and give advice, the final stage – payment – still requires human confirmation. Visa plans to change that by letting AI complete purchases on its own.
As part of this initiative, the company presented special AI-Ready Cards — cards with tokenized digital identifiers. They protect users’ personal data and allow limiting AI actions according to clearly defined parameters: financial limits, authorization levels and spending rules.
The application of the new technology can cover a wide range of scenarios — from automated product ordering to ticket booking. At the same time, Visa emphasizes that for expensive or personalized purchases, such as the purchase of luxury goods, human involvement will remain necessary.
Jack Forestell, the company’s director of product and strategy, described the initiative as “a transformation on a scale comparable to the advent of e-commerce.” According to him, modern AI assistants are good at choosing products, but they are not able to complete the purchase.
At the same time, users will retain full control over AI actions. At the initial stage, each transaction will require confirmation, but later the assistant will be able to work more autonomously — for example, to independently choose tickets within a defined budget.
