What to know

  • Visa announced "Intelligent Commerce" and Mastercard launched "Agent Pay" - both services enable AI agents to shop and make purchases on behalf of users.
  • The payment giants are partnering with major tech companies including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to create AI-powered shopping experiences.
  • These initiatives aim to make shopping more personalized, secure, and convenient by allowing AI to browse, select, and purchase items based on user preferences.

Visa and Mastercard are entering the AI arena with new services that could transform how you shop online. On Wednesday, Visa unveiled "Intelligent Commerce," a service that enables AI to find and buy products on your behalf.

Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer, explained the concept: "The consumer sets limits, Visa helps with the rest." The company is collaborating with technology leaders including Microsoft, OpenAI, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Samsung, and Stripe to create AI-powered shopping experiences.

Visa Intelligent Commerce includes AI-ready credit cards that replace card details with tokenized digital credentials. The program also offers AI-powered personalization that shares basic spending insights to improve agent performance, with user consent.

Mastercard made a similar announcement on Tuesday with its "Agent Pay" feature. This service aims to enhance generative AI interactions by embedding payment options into personalized recommendations already available on conversational platforms.

In a practical example provided by Mastercard, a person planning a milestone birthday could communicate with an AI to curate outfits and accessories from boutiques based on their style, venue atmosphere, and weather. The AI agent could then finalize the purchase and suggest the best payment method.

Mastercard is partnering with Microsoft to explore new applications for "agentic commerce" and is also working with IBM, Braintree, and Checkout.com on other aspects of AI-enhanced shopping.

These payment giants aren't alone in embracing AI for shopping. PayPal introduced its own version of agentic commerce on Tuesday. Earlier in April, Amazon began testing a new AI shopping assistant called "Buy for Me" with select users.

Other tech companies including OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have also demonstrated agents capable of browsing websites and helping users make purchases. OpenAI recently announced enhancements to ChatGPT search to offer users a better online shopping experience.

Forestell compared this transformation to previous shifts from physical shopping to online, and then from online to mobile, with AI now setting a new standard for commerce. "Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase, and manage on their behalf," he said.

Both Visa and Mastercard are emphasizing security in these new AI shopping initiatives. The services use tokenization, which replaces existing account numbers with one-off numbers that make cards useless if stolen.

Via: Tech Crunch