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.
Typing a credit card and a full street address every time I want to make an online payment feels incredibly archaic. There's so much they could do to improve the experience, and this definitely isn't it. The AI assistant can give me a button to add the item to my cart or link me directly to the plane ticket just fine. If payment was just two taps to wrap up the checkout process then it's nbd.
GNU Taler when?
Different article but it does more than filling forms. These companies would probably pay the AI companies to influence the bot or something.
The AI companies have already been very open about how the plan for monetizing the chatbots is to offer seamless ads integrated directly into the output text.
This is absolutely the game plan for agents.