SALTZMAN: Wait, what? AI will soon shop for you

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What if your AI assistant doesn’t just recommend a flight for an upcoming trip but also pays for it on your behalf?

“Welcome to the future of possible,” Visa CEO Ryan McInerney teased on Wednesday, shortly after taking the stage at Visa’s Product Drop press event in San Francisco.

Visa officially took the wraps off its Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative, a suite of tools and technologies to facilitate AI-based shopping.

With your consent, of course, Visa partners like OpenAI – the parent company to ChatGPT – will soon work with “AI agents” to research, select, and even buy that flight for you. You could even set parameters, such as a price threshold (if the fare drops below say $400), as well as no stopovers or redeyes.

Until now, AI agents could curate personalized recommendations for products and services but would stop short of transacting with merchants.

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This is the full-circle solution Visa is aiming to provide.

“Today, when your AI agent displays your itinerary, makes all kinds of recommendations for you, restaurants and excursions, it’s pretty magical,” conceded McInerney, referring to a hypothetical scenario for an upcoming vacation. “I’m going say to the AI, ‘This looks fantastic, let’s book it,’ and then my agent is going to tell me, ‘I’m sorry. I’m not fully trained to make payments for you, but I could direct you to websites where you can make these purchases,’ and so this is where all the fun currently ends.”

“But it’s actually a pretty solvable problem, (as) we could give AI agents payment tools,” McInerney explained.

If done right, this could free up a lot of time and hassle.

TRUST A KEY ISSUE

Given its decades-long reputation of secure payments, a company like Visa has the potential to make agentic commerce a reality.

After all, Visa’s network has processed more than 3.3 trillion transactions over the past 25 years, evolving from brick-and-mortar shopping to online retail and mobile commerce, to the promise of agent-driven AI purchases.

(Fun fact: Visa processed the first e-commerce transaction back on Aug. 11, 1994. It was a pepperoni pizza.)

“Visa Intelligent Commerce provides a missing link in the AI commerce experience,” Jordan McKee, research director with 451 Research, told Postmedia. “Trusted, recognizable providers, like Visa, are needed to bring AI-powered commerce to life at scale.”

“Success will be dependent on ecosystem-wide collaboration, but Visa’s launch is a critical building block for the industry to start from,” McKee added.

SO, HOW SHOULD IT WORK?

Essentially, your Visa card would be securely stored and used once you review the details and approve the transaction by the AI agent.

“There will be a one-time setup for Visa customers, to allow the agent to buy on your behalf,” Mark Nelsen, global head of Consumer Products at Visa, clarified in an interview with Postmedia. “With the help of our more than 14,000-plus bank partners around the world, we’re going to verify it’s you, and then you’ll be good to go.

And yes, the same credit card protections you enjoy today with retail and online shopping – such as tokenization and authentication – remain the same in the era of “agentic commerce.”

(Tokenization replaces your real Visa number with randomly generated and encrypted code, so your private data isn’t disclosed. Authentication is moving to more convenient biometrics-based “passkeys,” such as using your face to uniquely identify you.)

“Even as the technologies evolve and buyer and seller preferences evolve, our goal hasn’t changed, which is to connect buyers and sellers through seamless, secure digital payments,” McInerney asserted.

“I want to emphasize the protection of data privacy, consent and control of your data – all of this is very important to us,” McInerney reiterated.

“We’re not sharing any raw user data, your transaction data remains private, and you get to decide which provider can access any of your insights, your preferences, and can stop sharing at any time,” he added.

WHEN WILL THIS BE AVAILABLE?

According to Nelsen, we should see the start of Visa-led agentic commerce “in the next couple of months.”

“We have a number of partners now … they’re in our sandbox and testing, and it’s going well,” he added.

Along with OpenAI, Visa announced a few additional agentic commerce partners, including Perplexity, Microsoft, Anthropic, Samsung, IBM, Stripe, and Mistral AI.

It should be noted that other tech heavyweights are dabbling with agentic commerce.

On April 3, Amazon announced it was testing an AI-powered service, dubbed Buy for Me, which lets some of its U.S. customers purchase items from brands at other sites, while remaining in the Amazon Shopping app. Depending on the product, AI will shop the brand site for you and send you a note to approve the purchase, or you may be prompted to visit the brand’s site directly. It’s currently free, but only available to some of Amazon’s existing customer base south of the border.

AI agents could handle as much as 20% of all e-commerce tasks within a year, Paul van der Boor, vice president of AI at technology investment firm Prosus, predicted in an interview with PYMNTS, a publication that centers on payments and payment technologies.

— Marc Saltzman is the host of the Tech It Out podcast and author of 17 books, including Apple Watch For Dummies (Wiley)