Visa wants to give artificial intelligence ‘agents’ your credit card

Artificial intelligence “agents” are supposed to be more than chatbots. The tech industry has spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf.

So far, they’re not doing much.

Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents — successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers — could find and buy you a sweater, weekly groceries or an airplane ticket.

“We think this could be really important,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”

Visa announced Wednesday it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers — among them U.S. companies Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France’s Mistral — to connect their AI systems to Visa’s payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative. Pilot projects begin Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year.

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Visa wants to give artificial intelligence 'agents' your credit card

Visa is hoping to hand your credit card to an artificial intelligence “agent” that can find and buy clothes, groceries, airplane tickets and other items on your behalf.

apnews.com

 

[Tall Timbers]

I'm trying to imagine how this could be beneficial to anyone and am striking out.

 

[mattfivefour]

Well, the idea is you don't have to shop around for the best deal. AI will know every single one of your personal preferences and budget capabilities and will do it for you. Just think how beautifully that will fit in with the Antichrist's plans.

 

[Baby Yoda]

successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers — could find and buy you a sweater, weekly groceries or an airplane ticket.

Wait, what???

 

[Tall Timbers]

Well, the idea is you don't have to shop around for the best deal. AI will know every single one of your personal preferences and budget capabilities and will do it for you. Just think how beautifully that will fit in with the Antichrist's plans.

What I could see happening is the AI bots would be buying things that are in surplus for you, and some big corporation that manages that aspect of AI would get kickbacks for moving product that nobody really wants.

I don't wear sweaters but if AI were purchasing for me I might get a new one every fall...

 

[Ghoti Ichthus]

No.

 

[Batman]

I've watched a host of A.I. projections these past 25+ years by experts or so called experts, and most are terrified of the hacker capabilities that will result. The way our data is treated I'm guessing or SSN (or equivalent in other countries), driver's license information, credit card data, birth certificate, and the other vital private things we would not want out is already out. I used to not care but with the threat of losing retirement funds, checking, savings, and even house, etc. it has to be something we take serious. The problem is that we are pawns and have no power and no defense. Very concerning.

 

[Ghoti Ichthus]

I've watched a host of A.I. projections these past 25+ years by experts or so called experts, and most are terrified of the hacker capabilities that will result. The way our data is treated I'm guessing or SSN (or equivalent in other countries), driver's license information, credit card data, birth certificate, and the other vital private things we would not want out is already out. I used to not care but with the threat of losing retirement funds, checking, savings, and even house, etc. it has to be something we take serious. The problem is that we are pawns and have no power and no defense. Very concerning.

I have LifeLock, which has helped immensely, both preventing and addressing problems.

The first time my identity was stolen, it was an AT&T employee. I paid my cell phone bill every month in person using cash, the same employee, to minimize the possibility of having my identity stolen, and that employee is who stole my identity and used it to commit fraud


Once one's identity is stolen and/or information is compromised, it's out there, it'll get sold on the dark web, and again and again and again

 

[Tall Timbers]

Once one's identity is stolen and/or information is compromised, it's out there, it'll get sold on the dark web, and again and again and again

Pretty much every human in the world who has any personal data stored in the cloud has also lost that information to the dark web several times.

 

[Ghoti Ichthus]

I frequently get emails from Amazon saying they found something I might like.
Guess they're not content with the amount of money I spend there.
Or they think I'm stupid.
I wonder what would happen if I marked such a message as



And virtually everything Amazon suggests as an alternative to what I'm considering on the site is inferior, more expensive, or simply too different to meet the need


Such a wonderful advertisement for the competence/usefulness of AI