Visa Teams Up With OpenAI and Major Tech Firms to Push AI-Led Commerce

Visa is positioning the next phase of online shopping around automation—where consumers do less of the searching and clicking themselves. The payments company has partnered with OpenAI under a new program called "Visa Intelligent Commerce," built to enable AI agents to find products, decide what to buy, and complete transactions on a consumer's behalf. Marketed as "Find and Buy with AI," the initiative extends beyond OpenAI. Visa has lined up a broad group of technology partners including Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Stripe and Samsung. At the core is a payments framework that combines tokenized credentials with agent-specific APIs, aiming to create secure rails for AI-driven purchases. Under the model, AI agents receive dedicated payment credentials, protected by authentication requirements and bounded by consumer-defined controls such as spending limits. The framework relies on tokenization, which replaces sensitive card data with unique digital tokens. Each AI agent would authenticate via Visa's infrastructure, follow the user's security settings, and execute purchases within preset constraints. By working with multiple AI labs at once, Visa is signaling it is not betting on a single AI platform, but building interoperability across competing systems. Investors are also watching Visa's stablecoin efforts. The company's stablecoin settlement pilots are projected to reach a $7 billion annualized run rate by April 2026. The pilots now span nine blockchain networks and more than 130 programs focused on transaction flows with heavy stablecoin usage. Earlier in 2025, talks also emerged around potential stablecoin wallet capabilities tied to Sam Altman's World Network, the biometric identity project previously known as Worldcoin. For investors, competitive positioning will matter. Stripe's role stands out given its dominance in online payment processing for many merchants. For crypto-focused investors, the expansion of stablecoin settlement is the more direct takeaway: a $7 billion annualized run rate across nine blockchains suggests Visa is actively testing stablecoin utility in institutional-grade payment flows. The key risk is execution. Large, multi-party AI collaborations—especially ones involving OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Samsung—often move more slowly than any single participant would prefer.