According to CNBC, Visa announced on Thursday that its new AI shopping tool has already successfully completed hundreds of transactions. This pilot program started after the company’s product event in April. Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s head of growth products and partnerships, stated that this year will see “enormous” material adoption of such AI agents by consumers. The company also revealed a December survey finding that nearly half of U.S. shoppers are already using AI for purchases. Visa plans to launch pilot programs in Asia and Europe next year and is working with over 20 partners on these AI agent tools.
The Agentic Shopping Arms Race
So here’s the thing: Visa isn’t doing this in a vacuum. This is a full-blown arms race in the fintech and e-commerce world. Mastercard unveiled its “Agent Pay” test back in April. Amazon started testing a “Buy For Me” feature that same month. PayPal and Perplexity are teaming up on their own tools. Basically, every major player sees the same trend and is terrified of being left behind. They all believe the next interface won’t be a website or an app you scroll through—it’ll be a chatbot you simply tell what you want.
How This Actually Works
Now, the big question is what are these “agents” actually doing? The vision is that instead of you manually searching for a product, comparing prices, adding to cart, and checking out, you’d tell an AI, “Order my usual weekly groceries,” or “Find me the best deal on a new coffee maker under $100.” The AI would then go and execute that task across the web, using your stored payment credentials and preferences. Visa’s Rubail Birwadker hinted it’s useful for consistent purchases or high-stress events like snagging concert tickets. But let’s be honest, the technical and trust hurdles are massive. How does the AI know your “usual” groceries if you ran out of eggs last week? What if it picks a sketchy third-party seller with the lowest price? The agent has to navigate a minefield of user intent, security, and merchant reliability.
The Real Challenge Isn’t Technology
I think the core challenge here isn’t really the AI. We have capable enough language models. The real battle is over the transaction layer itself. Companies like Visa and Mastercard aren’t just building cute shopping helpers. They’re fighting to remain the essential, trusted pipe through which all these new AI-driven purchases flow. If an AI agent hosted by, say, Amazon decides to use its own payment system by default, that’s a direct threat to the card networks. That’s why Visa is working with “over 20 partners”—they need to embed their system into as many agent environments as possible. You can read more about their official stance in their press release. The adoption might be coming, but the power struggles behind the scenes are just getting started.
