E-commerce is coming to a chatbot near you

Axios

01-05-2025

Soon online shoppers will be able to make purchases straight from their chatbots, which could drive the biggest shift in shopping since Amazon or the iPhone.
Why it matters: Shopping has fueled every internet boom from the dot-com to mobile to social.
Driving the news: Visa on Wednesday announced a push to embed its payment network into AI systems, including chatbots and agents.
The effort is in the early testing stage, with Visa listing OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral and Perplexity among its partners.
"We think the shift could rival the level of impact that e-commerce and mobile commerce themselves have [had]," Visa chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell said at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Mastercard and PayPal also announced agentic commerce efforts this week.
How it works: Visa demoed the ability to enter a credit or debit card into a chatbot once, allowing AI agents to use that payment mechanism — with user consent — to purchase a range of goods and services through natural conversation.
Under the hood, Visa is incorporating the tokenization technology it has used to secure mobile and online commerce, combined with mechanisms for communicating authentication, payment intent and instructions.
Separately, OpenAI said Monday that it is adding direct product links to ChatGPT search starting with categories including fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics.
Between the lines: The biggest hurdle to so-called conversational commerce isn't technological. It's trust.
"We could give AI agents payment tools today, and they'd be able to go out, access your credentials, your cards, your money, and go spend it," Forestell said on stage Wednesday. "That would just uncover a bunch of other really important problems that we need to get solved before we take step one."
Reality check: Widespread use remains uncertain, even for early adopters.
"I find this one really hard to call," Forestell said, noting that e-commerce has been around for 25 years and still accounts for less than half of sales globally. "Part of me says that it takes time."
On the other hand, he said, "It was 29 months ago when zero people were using [generative AI chatbots]" and now there are billions using ChatGPT, Llama and similar tools.
Forestell is "hopeful that within the next 12 months" people have the option to use autonomous agent payments, at least within certain use cases.
The intrigue: Chatbots will reshape shopping. And shopping will reshape chatbots.
Where commerce goes, advertising tends to follow, as do other means for technology providers to benefit, such as revenue-sharing and affiliate programs.
Google was once free of advertising and commerce, as was Facebook. The tech giants eventually changed the face of both industries, while their services also morphed into something radically different from how they launched.
What they're saying: An OpenAI representative said that the company does not have affiliate links nor does it receive revenue from purchases made through ChatGPT search, nor does it have current plans to do so.
In a video shown at the Visa event, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said that the company wants customers to have confidence ChatGPT is always "giving them the best answer, not an answer that got skewed by, say, our business model, or a decision on something like advertising."
What's next: Experts say retailers need to start rethinking their e-commerce strategy to prepare for chatbots to play a significant role.