It is assumed that artificial intelligence “agents” are more than chatbots. The technology industry has spent months promoting personal assistants of AI who know what you want and can do real work in your name.
But so far, they are not doing much.
Visa expects to change that giving you access to your credit card. It establishes a budget and some preferences, and these AI agents – chatgpt signs and their chatbots peers – could find and buy you a sweater, weekly purchases or a plane ticket.
“We believe that this could be really important,” said Jack Forell, product director and visa strategy, in an interview. “Transformational, in the order of magnitude of the arrival of electronic commerce itself.”
Visa announced that it is being associated with a group of leaders of Chatbots from AI – among them the companies of the United States Anthropic, Microsoft, Openai and Perpleplexity, and the French Mistral – to connect their AI systems to the visa payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, the Stripe online payments and Samsung phone manufacturer in the initiative. Pilot projects begin on Wednesday, and it is planned that there will be more widespread use for next year.
The San Francisco Payment Processing Company is committed to what now seems futuristic could become a convenient alternative for our most mundane purchase tasks in the near future. It has spent the last six months working with AI developers to address the technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer uses it.
For emerging AI companies, Visa’s support could also increase their possibilities to compete with Amazon and Google technological giants, which dominate digital trade and are developing their own AI agents.
The technology industry is already full of demonstrations of the capacities of what it calls the agriculture, although few are still in the real world. Most are still reformulated versions of large language models – the generative technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarize documents or help people program. Trained with huge amounts of data, you can explore the Internet and bring recommendations of things to buy, but they have more difficulty going beyond that.
“The first agents -based trade incarnations are beginning to do a very good job in the dimension of purchases and discovery of the problem, but they are having enormous problems with payments,” said Forestell. “You get to this point where agents literally only return it and say: ‘Ok, go and buy it.”
Visa considers that he plays a key role in giving AI agents easier and more reliable to the money they need to make purchases.
-“The problem of payments is not something that AI platforms can solve by themselves,” said Forestell. “That’s why we start working with them.”
The new AI initiative occurs almost a year after Visa announced important changes in how credit and debit cards will operate in the United States, making physical cards and their 16 -digit numbers increasingly irrelevant.
Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay that convert their phones into a credit card. A similar process of verification of someone’s digital credentials would authorize AI agents to work on behalf of a client, in a way that, according to Forestell, must assure buyers, banks and merchants that transactions are legitimate and that visa will handle disputes.
Forestell said that this does not mean that AI agents will take control of all the purchase experience, but it could be useful for tasks that bore some people – such as grocery shopping, household improvement items or even Christmas lists – or are too complicated, such as travel reserves. In those situations, some people might want an agent who “simply does and automatically goes and do things for us,” said Forestell.
Other purchase experiences, such as luxury items, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in options and comparisons, said Forestell. In that case, he imagines that AI agents will still offer assistance but will remain in the background.
And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of US consumers reached 1.21 billion dollars at the end of last year, according to the New York Federal Reserve.
Forestell says that consumers will give their agents of clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human still has control. At first, it is likely that IA agents consult buyers to make sure they agree with a specific plane ticket. Over time, these agents could obtain more autonomy to “spend up to $ 1,500 on any airline to take me from A B,” he said.
Part of what attracts some IA developers to the association with Visa is that, with the client’s consent, an AI agent can also access a large amount of data on past purchases with the credit card.
“Visa has the ability of a user to share flows of his history of transactions with us,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Business Director of Perplexity. “When we generate a recommendation,” let’s say you are asking, ‘What are the best laptops?’ – We will know what other transactions you have made and the preferences revealed from that. “
The perplexity chatbot can now reserve hotels and make another type of purchases, but it is still in the early stages of AI trade, Shevelenko explained. The Startup of San Francisco has also said, together with the creator of Chatgpt, Openai, to a Federal Court that would consider buying the Google Internet browser, Chrome, if the United States forces a separation of the technological giant in a pending antimonopoly case.
