Visa plugs OpenAI into payments infrastructure
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Visa is teaming up with OpenAI to give AI agents a way to spend money on users' behalf, within limits.
Why it matters: The deal cements foundational infrastructure that could bring agentic commerce closer to broader adoption.
Driving the news: The companies are integrating Visa's payments tools into OpenAI's agent system so AI agents can eventually complete transactions without users manually checking out every time.
- Users would be able to set spending caps, merchant restrictions and approval requirements, while Visa handles fraud detection, chargebacks and refunds
- The companies say the same setup could eventually support consumer shopping, business invoice payments and even AI coding agents buying APIs, compute or other developer services.
What they're saying: "Agents will play an increasingly important role in helping people complete tasks that involve money — from purchases and payments to more complex transactions," Marco Mahrus, OpenAI's head of partnerships and commerce, said.
- More than one in five transactions are "really being influenced by what [users are] learning through LLMs," Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth, told Axios, adding that AI is influencing buying decisions more than previously anticipated.
- The integration will "allow OpenAI, and then over time other platforms, to build better commerce experiences," Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth, told Axios.
- It could end up feeling similar to the experience you get when shopping via Apple Pay or Shop Pay, he said.
- The partnership creates the integration that can power agentic payments in the future, whatever form they come in, the companies say.
Yes, but: Visa and OpenAI don't know exactly what this will look like for users yet.
Between the lines: The partnership is about more than just letting an agent order and pay for pizza delivery.
- OpenAI's Codex coding agents could eventually use authenticated payment credentials to purchase additional inference, APIs or other services autonomously within user-defined limits, for example.
Flashback: OpenAI has previously experimented with bringing commerce into ChatGPT.
- Instant Checkout, a native checkout experience meant to launch within ChatGPT, struggled to gain traction and was later scaled back, per The Information.
The bottom line: OpenAI is opening the door to agentic commerce, but don't expect ChatGPT to become Amazon overnight.
