Artificial intelligence “agents” are supposed to be more than chatbots. The tech industry has spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf. So far, they’re not doing much.
Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents — successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers — could find and buy you a sweater, weekly groceries or an airplane ticket.
“We think this could be really important,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”
Visa announced Wednesday it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers — among them U.S. companies Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France’s Mistral — to connect their AI systems to Visa’s payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative. Pilot projects begin Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year.
The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it.
If you want to make the switched-off people that know very little about AI hate this shit then putting them through one single experience of losing their money because of an AI and having to spend fucking hours on phonecalls or chatbots to try and get their money back will do it.
One single error will make them AI haters for life because of the massive inconvenience in time and stress that dealing with error purchases can be. In particular when people don't have any leeway on their bills and budgeting to lose money to an AI that decided to spend. The stress that will generate will be very significant.
Yep. I'm sure the people who spent 20 years complaining about "press one for English" will be thrilled when the chat bot that lies for your approval spends your money by itself, on something you didn't want, didn't receive, and every time you ask it for help it agrees with you and then does nothing at all.
Like I already have instant rage when I have to call some place and get an automated answering service. Chat bots will make me explode.