AI is changing many aspects of how humans work, but it can also fundamentally change how they shop.
Visa CEO Ryan McInerney has discussed the company’s plans to launch AI-powered cards and credentials that will allow AI agents to make purchases on behalf of users. McInerney’s comments hint at a near future where AI agents negotiate deals, hunt down rare items, and manage our shopping lists, all while operating within the boundaries we set. What’s particularly intriguing is the speed with which Visa expects this technology to roll out, with partnerships already in place with major players in the AI field.
“First of all, we’re all going to have agents, and they’re going to be able to go out and scour the world’s inventory and find what it is that we’re looking for,” McInerney stated. “Maybe it’s tickets to a hard-to-get concert, or a hyper-relevant gift for my wife for Mother’s Day.”
He continued, explaining Visa’s role: “What we have announced is a set of tools that give agents the capabilities to go make payments on your behalf. Think of that as AI-enabled Visa credentials and also the rules and the capabilities that will provide trust—trust that consumers will have in their agents, trust that merchants are going to have that they’re going to get paid, and trust that financial institutions will have that you’ve actually empowered your agent to make those purchases on your behalf.”
“So we announced AI-enabled Visa cards that’s going to allow you to give your agent agency, giving them your Visa credentials to go buy something on your behalf,” McInerney explained further. “But we also announced important capabilities, things that enable you to set parameters and tell your agent how long do you want them to go look for something—maybe those concert tickets we were talking about—how much are you willing for your agent to spend, even to designate specific merchants that you want your agent to go look at and not go look at other merchants. So it’s the products, it’s the capabilities that are going to give you and everyone else trust that your agent is going to go buy exactly what you’re looking for on your behalf.”
Addressing the timeline, McInerney responded to the question of when this technology would be available: “You’re going to see this in months. You’re going to see this in the next couple of quarters. We announced a series of partnerships with all of the leading players in this space: with OpenAI, with Microsoft, with Anthropic, with Perplexity, with IBM, with Stripe—with all of the key players that are building out the infrastructure to enable this type of buying and shopping experience. So it’s going to be here soon.”
Agents are thought to be the next big thing in AI. These agents will be able to independently perform repetitive tasks that were being performed by humans. But there have been concerns around giving access to these agents to make financial transactions on their users’ behalf — if an agent were to go rouge and make purchases that the human never intended, it might be tricky to pin blame among the various players in the financial transaction space. But with Visa taking the lead in building shopping agents, it can help smoothen the transition — and build trust among all participants to let AIs shop on the internet like their human creators.