Visa’s plastic pals are now picking our pants: AI agents set to go shopping with your credit card.
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What a time to be alive. Visa has announced it wants to give artificial intelligence agents the keys to your wallet so they can buy things for you on their own — literally. In a jaw-dropping move that sounds like something out of Black Mirror, the credit card colossus says it’s letting robots loose with your money. Yes, really. Find out what they’re doing and whether you have a choice.
The finance giant dropped the bombshell this week, revealing it’s been secretly cooking up a sci-fi-style scheme called “Visa Intelligent Commerce” — where your new AI personal shopper doesn’t just recommend a handbag or compare hotel prices… it buys them. On its own. With your card…
“Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf,” boasted Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, in a press release. “Visa is setting a new standard for a new era of commerce.” Translation: Siri’s about to start spending your money.
From tap to trap? Visa hands AI the spending reins
For six months, Visa has been quietly working behind the scenes with tech’s most powerful players — including OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, Samsung, and even IBM — to supercharge AI agents with the power to buy products without us. They’re also teaming up with Stripe, the online payments behemoth.
The end goal? Autonomous agents that can buy your weekly shop, book your holidays, or nab that birthday jumper for Aunty Simmy — all without you lifting a finger.
Forget credit card numbers. These futuristic AI-ready cards will use “tokenised digital credentials,” Visa says, which are supposedly safer than the old plastic — and impossible to memorise. Handy.
Trust me, I’m a robot… with your bank details
Visa insists you’ll be in control. Kind of. “Only the consumer can instruct the agent on what to do and when to activate a payment credential,” Visa reassures.
These AI agents will have access to your spending history — what you bought, when you bought it, and how often you panic-purchase after midnight. AI can then recommend products and encourage you to buy certain things based on what’s best for you, according to AI. Customers worldwide are ecstatic.
“Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,” Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko told the Associated Press.
“When we generate a recommendation — say you’re asking, ‘What are the best laptops?’ — we would know what other transactions you’ve made and the revealed preferences from that.”
Revealed preferences? Sounds like Minority Report meets MoneySuperMarket.
Mastercard joins the robo-shopper arms race
Visa’s not alone in this techno-madness. Just one day before, Mastercard launched its own AI assistant, “Agent Pay,” featuring some of the same collaborators — OpenAI, IBM, and Microsoft — ready to hoover up your financial habits.
These bots, we’re told, will “recommend and transact” like a personal assistant who never sleeps and never forgets how many times you’ve bought Crocs.
But here’s the rub: current AI agents can barely manage a Tesco shop without needing a babysitter. OpenAI’s much-hyped “Operator” assistant has been painfully slow and often grinds to a halt, needing humans to type in passwords, approve purchases, and hold its metaphorical hand.
The card wars have gone Skynet — and Visa’s all-in
Visa claims that by plugging its payment network into these AI brains, it’ll solve what tech firms haven’t been able to — a frictionless, fully autonomous checkout. No more “Confirm Purchase” clicks. Just instruct your AI agent, and poof — the purchase is made. Whether you like it or not.
“The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves,” Forestell admitted. “That’s why we started working with them.” So, should we cheer or panic?
The bottom line: Is this genius or financial suicide?
If it all sounds a bit dodgy, that’s because it is. You’re being asked to hand over the keys to your bank account to an error-prone algorithm that thinks pineapple pizza is a good idea and can’t tell the difference between “buy” and “bye-bye savings”.
On the one hand, we’re promised a futuristic world of effortless spending. On the other? A dystopia where your robot PA splurges on spa candles and samurai swords because you searched “stress relief” last week.
Visa’s robo-shopper revolution is coming — but whether it’s a godsend or a gold-plated nightmare is still very much up for grabs. How will they get this past UK and EU privacy laws?
Would you trust a robot with your credit card? Let us know in the comments.
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