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.
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.
The AI bros see you as an unnecessary obstacle between them and your money. AI purchasing would reduce friction. For them.
If you want to make the switched-off people that know very little about AI hate this shit then putting them through one single experience of losing their money because of an AI and having to spend fucking hours on phonecalls or chatbots to try and get their money back will do it.
One single error will make them AI haters for life because of the massive inconvenience in time and stress that dealing with error purchases can be. In particular when people don’t have any leeway on their bills and budgeting to lose money to an AI that decided to spend. The stress that will generate will be very significant.
Like I already have instant rage when I have to call some place and get an automated answering service. Chat bots will make me explode.
Yep. I’m sure the people who spent 20 years complaining about “press one for English” will be thrilled when the chat bot that lies for your approval spends your money by itself, on something you didn’t want, didn’t receive, and every time you ask it for help it agrees with you and then does nothing at all.
I look forward to AI deciding that I would want to purchase something with a 58% probability so it goes ahead with the transaction and when I try to dispute it, I get put on the line with an AI chatbot that keeps telling it has been refunded when it hasn’t at all.
It has been refunded. Just not to you.
As it’s the holidays, I very recently had to deal with a package someone ordered for me. The courier didn’t even attempt to deliver, and dropped it at a distribution center an hour away. I go online to see if I can get it moved somewhere closer so I can actually pick it up and the only interface they have now is a fucking chatbot. It says it has flagged my package to be moved to a closer location.
This was a lie, and two days later the tracking info says “returned to sender”.
I can’t wait for AI to spend hundreds of dollars automatically on stuff that never arrives.
“What are they complaining about? How much could airplane tickets cost, anyway? 10 thousand dollars?”
I dream of a future where peasants are just lobotomized and stuck in mechanical walker suits while the AI conducts all the purchases we were going to and are supposed to make; take the opinionated and argumentative personhood out of the equation so society can function as it’s supposed to.
Nobody ever asks what it’s like at a shopping mall on a borg cube
As long as they take care of the wrong charges, they can post it on a billboard. But that’s not how this is going to work, right?
please do it, i double dare you.
Typing a credit card and a full street address every time I want to make an online payment feels incredibly archaic. There’s so much they could do to improve the experience, and this definitely isn’t it. The AI assistant can give me a button to add the item to my cart or link me directly to the plane ticket just fine. If payment was just two taps to wrap up the checkout process then it’s nbd.
GNU Taler when?
Instead of navigating a merchant’s site directly, consumers increasingly rely on software to search, compare, and sometimes buy on their behalf. For instance, whereas previously buying a new suitcase might involve exploring a dozen retailer’s sites, soon you might have AI do the legwork for you. That shift introduces a new intermediary—one that can be helpful, harmful, or fraudulent.
Different article but it does more than filling forms. These companies would probably pay the AI companies to influence the bot or something.
The AI companies have already been very open about how the plan for monetizing the chatbots is to offer seamless ads integrated directly into the output text.
This is absolutely the game plan for agents.
They could just do a deep link into the mobile banking app (in the mobile browser or in other apps) or QR codes (in the desktop browser). Then the app, shows the charges and the recipient and you just hit confirm.
There is no need for a fucking AI.
This is what Apple Pay already does for off-device transactions. You scan a QR code and complete the transaction on your phone.
Yes it’s not a new idea. I don’t think there should be so many parties involved though.
