At the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, Visa announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI designed to bring agentic commerce into the mainstream.
As part of the partnership, Visa is bringing its global payment network and security infrastructure to OpenAI experiences. The goal is to make agentic commerce more accessible, trusted, and secure for consumers and businesses worldwide. Visa Intelligent Commerce provides the foundation to make this possible.
For decades, technology has reshaped how people shop. Commerce moved from stores to websites, from websites to mobile apps, and from mobile apps to digital wallets and one-click checkout. Each shift reduced friction, increased convenience, and expanded consumer choice.
Today, another transformation is underway. Artificial intelligence is becoming part of how consumers discover products, evaluate options, and make decisions. As AI shopping assistants grow more capable, they are beginning to help consumers complete real-world tasks, including research, comparison, and checkout.
This shift signals the emergence of a new commerce paradigm.
OpenAI’s Interface, Visa’s Global Payment Network
Visa’s payment capabilities will be integrated into OpenAI experiences, giving developers and merchants a streamlined way to accept Visa payments initiated by AI agents.
Visa will deliver the underlying global network, payment tokenization, authorization, agent identification, and fraud monitoring infrastructure to support secure, and trusted AI-initiated transactions.
Transactions operate inside guardrails that the consumer or business sets: spending limits, required approval thresholds, and other permission layers that keep the buyer in command even when an agent is executing the work.
The partnership also helps open a broader frontier of enterprise and developer applications. Beyond agentic commerce, Visa and OpenAI intend to explore embedding payment primitives and trusted agent identity signals into developer-focused experiences powered by Codex — OpenAI’s coding agent that helps you build and ship with AI — as well as automated and conversational business workflows as AI continues to evolve as a primary interface for digital interaction.
Future applications may include cardholder benefits, premium consumer and small business credit product experiences, and additional commerce use cases across OpenAI’s expanding platform.
Trusted Commerce on a Global Scale
Millions of people worldwide use OpenAI’s platforms every day to learn, create, solve problems, write code, and increasingly, to take real-world actions. ChatGPT, Codex, and OpenAI’s expanding suite of agentic products represent a new kind of interface: one that does not just answer questions, but acts on behalf of users across the web, across applications, and now across commerce.
Visa Intelligent Commerce is Visa’s portfolio for enabling trusted agent-driven transactions. It brings together solutions, developer tools, and ecosystem programs that include tokenized payment capabilities and secure execution through Visa APIs.
Together, these capabilities create an interoperable, secure foundation that enables AI shopping assistants to participate in commerce at a global scale across platforms and merchants. As agentic commerce continues to evolve, every ecosystem participant faces questions including whether a consumer authorized a specific transaction, if AI agents are operating within approved parameters and if the agent is trusted, and if issuers can confidently authorize transactions in real time.
Visa is helping address these challenges through its payment infrastructure. Visa enables secure transaction initiation, applies real-time authorization and fraud monitoring, and enforces user-defined permission controls such as spending limits, merchant category restrictions, and approval requirements. These controls help ensure consumers remain in command, even when an agent is executing the transaction on their behalf.
Delivering Value Across the Ecosystem
The promise of an OpenAI solution integrated with Visa extends well beyond any individual transaction. The benefits may compound across every participant in the payments and commerce ecosystem.
- For consumers: AI shopping assistant agents can help save time, reduce research effort, surface personalized choices, and complete routine purchases — without sacrificing transparency, and control over what gets authorized.
- For merchants and developers: Integration with OpenAI’s platform and Visa’s network can help provide a streamlined path to accept AI payments, reach consumers through new agentic channels, recognize trusted agents, and build entirely new commerce experiences on trusted infrastructure.
- For issuers and financial institutions: Tokenized payment credentials and real-time authorization extend proven security and risk management capabilities into AI-commerce — maintaining visibility and control as agents enter the payment flow.
- For enterprise and B2B: Automated and conversational workflows, including developer tools like Codex, create new efficiencies across procurement, invoicing, reconciliation, and payment execution — accelerating digital commerce at scale.
Building the Foundation for What’s Next
Innovation is driving the growth of agentic commerce. Trust, interoperability, and collaboration are what will allow it to continue to scale.
The work between Visa and OpenAI reflects that belief, bringing together AI innovation and trusted commerce infrastructure to help shape the future of commerce.
Through Visa Intelligent Commerce, Visa is helping connect ecosystem participants through secure, interoperable foundations designed to enable agentic commerce and preserve consumer control and confidence.
The future of agentic commerce will be built across the ecosystem. This collaboration is one example of how that future is already taking shape.
And it is proof of what is already being built.