Visa embeds payment network in ChatGPT for AI shopping purchases

Visa took a step beyond AI product recommendations and into AI purchasing, embedding its payment network inside ChatGPT so a chatbot can help complete transactions on behalf of users. The move, announced June 10 at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, pushes the technology from adviser to transaction-maker and puts consumer risk, trust and liability at the center of the next phase of online shopping.

Under the partnership with OpenAI, Visa said it will bring its global network, credentialing capabilities, tokenization, authorization and fraud-monitoring systems into OpenAI experiences. The company said users will be able to set guardrails such as spending limits, merchant-category restrictions and required approvals before an AI agent acts. That design is meant to keep the consumer or business in control, but it also highlights the unanswered rules around mistaken purchases, fraud, refunds and data security when software is authorized to behave like a shopper.

Visa has been building toward this shift for more than a year. Its broader Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative launched in April 2025, and by December 2025 the company said it had already completed hundreds of secure, agent-initiated transactions in pilot programs. Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, said the company’s commerce push depends on trust from users, banks and sellers, and he has argued that AI agents will need to be able to “find, shop and buy” for consumers based on preset preferences.

OpenAI has been moving in the same direction, but with a rougher path. It launched Instant Checkout in September 2025, initially for single-item purchases from U.S. Etsy sellers, with plans to expand to more than one million Shopify merchants. OpenAI said users would not pay fees and prices would stay the same, while merchants would pay a small fee on completed purchases. By March 2026, though, OpenAI was shifting away from that model and moving purchases into ChatGPT apps and dedicated merchant integrations after product selection remained limited and item information was not always current.

The new Visa arrangement is broader than those earlier experiments because it is not tied to one retailer or a narrow merchant set. OpenAI said in March 2026 that ChatGPT product discovery had expanded to include visual browsing, side-by-side comparisons and more up-to-date item information. Visa and OpenAI also said the collaboration will explore enterprise uses, including Codex-powered workflows, giving developers and merchants a more direct way to accept Visa payments initiated by AI agents.

What is being built is not just a faster checkout. It is a new commercial layer in which software can browse, decide and pay, while banks and merchants lean on Visa’s infrastructure to make that feel safe enough for scale. The technical rails are arriving first; the rules for who pays when the agent gets it wrong are still catching up.