Visa has announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco to bring agentic commerce into wider use. The partnership combines Visa’s global payments network with OpenAI experiences to support secure, trusted, and scalable AI-driven transactions for consumers, businesses, and developers.
The move comes as shopping continues to shift from physical stores to websites, mobile apps, and digital wallets. As Visa says, the next shift is already underway, with artificial intelligence beginning to shape how people discover products, compare options, and complete purchases. In this model, AI shopping assistants can help users with research, decision-making, and checkout.
Visa Intelligent Commerce will serve as the foundation for the collaboration. It is designed to give developers and merchants a way to accept Visa payments initiated by AI agents while keeping the consumer in control through permission settings such as spending limits, approval thresholds, and other guardrails.
How the Visa payment stack will work inside OpenAI experiences
Under the partnership, Visa will provide tokenization, authorization, agent identification, and fraud monitoring infrastructure to support AI-initiated payments. Tokenized Visa credentials replace sensitive card data with secure network tokens tied to specific agents and use cases, helping transactions stay protected inside OpenAI experiences.
The company further says the same security framework that supports more than 300 billion transactions each year on its network will now extend to AI commerce. The system is intended to provide issuers with visibility and control while allowing agents to act within the limits approved by the consumer or business.
The collaboration also reaches beyond consumer checkout. Visa and OpenAI plan to explore payment primitives and trusted agent identity signals in developer-focused experiences powered by Codex, along with automated and conversational business workflows. The companies see potential use cases in cardholder benefits, small business credit experiences, procurement, invoicing, reconciliation, and other commerce applications.
Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Visa, said, “AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did. As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s aim is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure, and seamless. That’s the infrastructure we’re building with partners like OpenAI.”
He further added, “The organizations that succeed in agentic commerce will not simply deliver smarter AI. They will deliver confidence.”
Marco Mahrus, Head of Partnerships, Commerce, OpenAI, said, “By integrating with Visa Intelligent Commerce, we’re building the infrastructure for secure, transparent, and user-controlled agentic transactions, helping people do more with AI agents while maintaining confidence that payments are being handled securely.”
