Latest news with #Forestell
Japan Today
03-05-2025
- Business
- Japan Today
Visa wants to give artificial intelligence 'agents' your credit card
By MATT O'BRIEN 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 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. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it. For emerging AI companies, Visa's backing could also boost their chances of competing with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are developing their own AI agents. The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what it calls agentic AI, though few are yet found in the real world. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models — the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarize documents or help people code. Trained on huge troves of data, they can scour the internet and bring back recommendations for things to buy, but they have a harder time going beyond that. 'The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a really good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments,' Forestell said. 'You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, 'OK, you go buy it.' Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases. 'The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. 'That's why we started working with them.' The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the U.S., making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant. Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apply Pay that turn their phones into a credit card. A similar process of vetting someone's digital credentials would authorize AI agents to work on a customer's behalf, in a way Forestell says must assure buyers, banks and merchants that the transactions are legitimate and that Visa will handle disputes. Forestell said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people — like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists — or are too complicated, like travel bookings. In those situations, some people might want an agent that 'just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us,' Forestell said. Other shopping experiences, such as for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons, Forestell said. In that case, he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background. And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit $1.21 trillion at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York. Forestell says consumers will give their AI agents clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human is still in control. At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to make sure they are OK with a specific airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might get more autonomy to 'go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. 'Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,' said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer. 'When we generate a recommendation -- say you're asking, 'What are the best laptops?' — we would know what are other transactions you've made and the revealed preferences from that.' Perplexity's chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it's still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko says. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google's internet browser, Chrome, if the U.S. forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case. © Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Euronews
01-05-2025
- Business
- Euronews
Visa wants to give artificial intelligence 'agents' your credit card
ADVERTISEMENT Visa announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers to connect their systems to Visa's payments network. The aim is to outsource personal budgeting jobs to AI bots. Users will be able to set preferences and spending limits, then the AI agents will search for products and complete purchases. Partner companies include US firms Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France's Mistral. Visa is also working on the initiative with IBM, online payment company Stripe, and phone-maker Samsung. Pilot projects began on Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what now feels like a futuristic concept could soon become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles, an essential step before offering the product to consumers. For emerging AI companies, Visa's backing could also boost their chances of competing with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are developing their own AI agents. 'We think this could be really important,' Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer, said in an interview. 'Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.' The limitations of agentic AI The tech industry is already showing what it can do with so-called "agentic" AI, though many uses still exist in an experimental form — not yet available to the public. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models — the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarise documents or help people code. Trained on huge troves of data, they can scour the internet and bring back recommendations for things to buy, but they have a harder time going beyond that. 'The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a really good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments,' Forestell said. 'You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, 'OK, you go buy it.'" Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases. 'The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. 'That's why we started working with them.' Digital payments The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the US, making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant. Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay that turn their phones into a credit card. A similar process of vetting someone's digital credentials would authorise AI agents to work on a customer's behalf, in a way Forestell says must assure buyers, banks and merchants that the transactions are legitimate and that Visa will handle disputes. ADVERTISEMENT Related Is the EU banning American credit cards? Microsoft and Meta beat estimates as AI outpaces Trump's tariff woes Forestell said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people — like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists — or are too complicated, like travel bookings. In those situations, some people might want an agent that 'just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us,' Forestell said. Other shopping experiences, such as for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons, Forestell said. In that case, he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background. Spending limits And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit $1.21 trillion (€1.1tn) at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York. ADVERTISEMENT Forestell says consumers will give their AI agents clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human is still in control. At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to make sure they are OK with a specific airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might get more autonomy to 'go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. 'Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,' Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer, said. 'When we generate a recommendation — say you're asking, 'What are the best laptops?' — we would know what are other transactions you've made and the revealed preferences from that.' ADVERTISEMENT Perplexity's chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it's still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko explained. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google's internet browser, Chrome, if the US forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case.
Axios
01-05-2025
- Business
- Axios
E-commerce is coming to a chatbot near you
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.
1News
01-05-2025
- Business
- 1News
Visa wants to give AI '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. In the US, Visa hopes to change that by giving them customers' credit cards. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents — successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers — could find and buy 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 it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers — among them US 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 (local time), ahead of more widespread usage expected next year. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it. For emerging AI companies, Visa's backing could also boost their chances of competing with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are developing their own AI agents. The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what it calls agentic AI, though few are yet found in the real world. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models — the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarise documents or help people code. Trained on huge troves of data, they can scour the internet and bring back recommendations for things to buy, but they have a harder time going beyond that. "The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a really good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments," Forestell said. "You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, 'OK, you go buy it.'" Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases. "The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell said. "That's why we started working with them." The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the US, making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant. Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay that turn their phones into a credit card. A similar process of vetting someone's digital credentials would authorise AI agents to work on a customer's behalf, in a way Forestell says must assure buyers, banks and merchants that the transactions are legitimate and that Visa will handle disputes. Forestell said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people — like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists — or are too complicated, like travel bookings. In those situations, some people might want an agent that "just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us", Forestell said. Other shopping experiences, such as for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons, Forestell said. In that case, he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background. And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit US$1.21 trillion (NZ$2 trillion) at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York. Forestell says consumers will give their AI agents clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human is still in control. At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to make sure they are OK with a specific airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might get more autonomy to "go spend up to $1500 on any airline to get me from A to B," he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. "Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us," said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer. "When we generate a recommendation — say you're asking, 'What are the best laptops?' — we would know what are other transactions you've made and the revealed preferences from that." Perplexity's chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it's still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko says. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google's internet browser, Chrome, if the US forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case.
The Star
01-05-2025
- Business
- The Star
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 April 30 it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers – among them US 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. The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it. For emerging AI companies, Visa's backing could also boost their chances of competing with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are developing their own AI agents. The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what it calls agentic AI, though few are yet found in the real world. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models – the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarise documents or help people code. Trained on huge troves of data, they can scour the internet and bring back recommendations for things to buy, but they have a harder time going beyond that. 'The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a really good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments,' Forestell said. 'You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, 'OK, you go buy it'.' Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases. 'The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves,' Forestell said. 'That's why we started working with them.' The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the US, making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant. Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay that turn their phones into a credit card. A similar process of vetting someone's digital credentials would authorise AI agents to work on a customer's behalf, in a way Forestell says must assure buyers, banks and merchants that the transactions are legitimate and that Visa will handle disputes. Forestell said that doesn't mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people – like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists – or are too complicated, like travel bookings. In those situations, some people might want an agent that 'just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us', Forestell said. Other shopping experiences, such as for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons, Forestell said. In that case, he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background. And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit US$1.21 trillion (RM5.22 trillion) at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York. Forestell says consumers will give their AI agents clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human is still in control. At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to make sure they are OK with a specific airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might get more autonomy to 'go spend up to US$1,500 (RM6,471) on any airline to get me from A to B', he said. Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer's consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases. 'Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,' said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer. 'When we generate a recommendation – say you're asking, 'What are the best laptops?' – we would know what are other transactions you've made and the revealed preferences from that.' Perplexity's chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it's still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko says. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google's internet browser, Chrome , if the US forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case. – AP
