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Throw caution to the wind and forget your retirement plans. The future is now, baby, and we’re letting AI agents go ham with our credit cards.
On Wednesday, the payment titan Visa announced that it’s integrating its payment network into ChatGPT, allowing the AI chatbot to buy stuff on your behalf, The Associated Press reports.
We don’t just mean putting stuff in the cart for you: with this system in place, an AI will actually be finalizing the order with your Visa card.
It’s a clear victory for AI companies, which have been pushing AI-powered shopping experiences on customers for over a year. The tech is already widely used for product recommendations and financial advice, but with the rise of AI agents, the likes of OpenAI have been touting the autonomous models’ ability to handle the entire shopping process, from picking the actual product to handling shipping details, all from a prompt.
Until now, however, few vendors accepted orders placed through ChatGPT, requiring a human to manually okay them instead. The idea seemed to run into some serious headwinds when OpenAI’s Instant Checkout feature, which allowed you to place an order inside the chatbot interface, was discontinued earlier this year.
But the new collaboration makes Instant Checkout seem quaint in comparison. Illustrating its potential, Visa chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell said a customer could ask the AI for a pair of wireless headphones under $150, and then the chatbot would find a pair that meets those criteria and buy it for you.
“I think we’re generally at a place where most people are very comfortable with the shopping aspects of it and have discovered this as a superior discovery experience,” Forestell told the AP in an interview. But he acknowledged that going from an AI recommending products to one outright buying them for you “requires a whole different level of trust.”
The potential for abuse can’t be overlooked. The scam-checking service Ask Silver recently found that ChatGPT was recommending fraudulent clones of real storefronts that steal your money and bank details. It seems inevitable that an AI given free license to shop around with your money will get duped by some sort of scam, especially as more and more of the internet is being “sloptimized” to trick chatbots into recommending products.
For its part, Visa is vowing to be on top of the issue.
“As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless,” Forestell told the AP.
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