In a major step toward automated digital economies, payment giant Visa Inc. and artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer OpenAI on Wednesday announced a strategic partnership to bring secure payment infrastructure to agentic commerce.
The collaboration, unveiled at the annual Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, aims to establish a trusted framework for payments initiated by AI agents across OpenAI platforms.
As AI evolves from passive assistance to active execution, AI agents are increasingly tasked with completing financial transactions on behalf of users. Through this alliance, Visa will integrate its global network, advanced tokenization, and risk-management capabilities directly into OpenAI’s ecosystem. This infrastructure will allow developers and merchants to seamlessly accept secure, agent-driven payments.
Visa executives called the shift a fundamental rewrite of modern retail and business.
“AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did,” Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said in a statement. “As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure, and seamless.”
To protect consumers and businesses, agentic transactions will operate under strict, user-defined guardrails. Users can set explicit permissions and controls, including spending limits, restricted merchant categories, and mandatory approval triggers. Security will be reinforced by Visa’s real-time authorization and continuous fraud monitoring, ensuring that automated transactions do not compromise user data.
The partnership is a flagship component of the Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative, which seeks to embed financial capabilities into emerging digital environments. Beyond immediate consumer applications, the two companies plan to explore enterprise solutions. These include developer-focused experiences powered by OpenAI’s Codex, alongside highly automated, conversational workflows designed to streamline business operations.
The collaboration marks a critical milestone in preparing global financial systems for an autonomous economy.
“Commerce is going to happen in many more places and in many more ways than it does today, and agents will play an increasingly important role,” said Marco Mahrus, head of partnerships, commerce, at OpenAI. “By integrating with Visa Intelligent Commerce, we’re building the infrastructure for secure, transparent, and user-controlled agentic transactions.”
By marrying Visa’s robust security network with OpenAI’s models, the partnership lays the groundwork for a new era of digital commerce, ensuring that as AI takes the wheel, financial security remains firmly in place, according to the companies.
“Visa’s announcement is a signal that agentic commerce is getting closer to the point of transaction, not just discovery,” Kumar Senthil, CEO of firmly.ai, said in an email. “The challenge for retailers is that most commerce infrastructure was built for consumers clicking through a website, not agents interpreting product data, checking availability, comparing options and completing a purchase on behalf of the consumer. The merchants that win here will be the ones that make their products and checkout flows easier for agents to work with, while still protecting the control over pricing, checkout, fulfillment and the customer relationship.”
