Imagine telling ChatGPT to reorder your paper towels or find the best wireless headphones in your budget, and it just handles the purchase without you lifting a finger. That is exactly what OpenAI and Visa are now building toward.
The two companies announced a strategic partnership at the Visa Payments Forum, with plans to bring Visa’s global payment infrastructure directly into OpenAI’s AI agent experiences, including ChatGPT and the Atlas browser.
How will ChatGPT’s payment system work?
The partnership is part of Visa’s broader Intelligent Commerce initiative, which is designed to extend secure payment capabilities into new digital spaces. When an AI agent purchases on your behalf, Visa handles the actual transaction using tokenized card credentials, real-time authorization, and fraud monitoring.
Tokenization means your actual card details are never exposed during a purchase, similar to how Apple Pay keeps your card information private. You also get to set your own rules for things like spending limits, which types of merchants the agent can buy from, and whether certain purchases need your approval first. So you stay in control without having to babysit every transaction.
OpenAI’s second shot at commerce
This isn’t OpenAI’s first attempt to turn ChatGPT into a checkout tool. An earlier feature called Instant Checkout, which carried a 4% merchant fee, failed to gain traction with retailers and was retired in March.
This time around, OpenAI is handing the difficult parts, like fraud detection and dispute, over to Visa, a network that already handles over 300 billion transactions a year.
Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Jack Forestell, says the jump from recommending a product to actually buying it needs a completely different level of trust. That said, there is still no launch date, pricing, or even a user interface to show yet.