Visa Inc. has struck a deal with OpenAI Group PBC to let artificial intelligence agents make payments for users, bringing one of the world’s largest payment networks into ChatGPT’s push toward agentic commerce.

The companies announced the partnership at the Visa Payments Forum today in San Francisco. Under the agreement, Visa’s payment tools will be integrated into OpenAI’s products, giving developers and merchants a way to accept Visa transactions initiated by AI agents rather than by a user manually checking out each time.

Visa will supply the network, tokenization and risk capabilities behind the transactions. Payments will run within user-defined permissions such as spending caps, merchant categories and required approvals and will use tokenized Visa credentials with real-time authorization and fraud monitoring. Visa will also handle chargebacks and refunds.

The collaboration sits within Visa Intelligent Commerce, the company’s initiative for extending payment capabilities into AI-driven environments. The two companies said they will also explore enterprise uses, including developer experiences powered by OpenAI’s Codex coding agent. Codex agents could eventually buy inference, application programming interfaces or other developer services on their own, within limits a user sets.

The deal is the latest sign that payments firms see agentic commerce as the next contested layer of online retail. More than one in five transactions are now “really being influenced by what they’re learning through” large language models, Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth, told Axios, adding that AI is shaping buying decisions faster than the company had expected. He said the integration could eventually feel similar to paying through Apple Pay or Shop Pay.

Neither company offered a launch date or said exactly how the experience will appear to consumers. The framework is designed to power agentic payments in whatever form they take, the companies said.

OpenAI has tried this before. It launched Instant Checkout in September, letting people buy from Etsy merchants inside ChatGPT. The feature never caught on and OpenAI pulled back on it this year, CNBC reported in March. In November, the company tried a different tack with Shopping Research, which pulls together buyers’s guides from product specs, reviews and pricing.

“AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did,” said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa. “As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless. That’s the infrastructure we’re building with partners like OpenAI.”

Marco Mahrus, OpenAI’s head of partnerships for commerce, said agents will take on a growing role in tasks that involve money, from purchases and payments to more complex transactions and that the integration is meant to keep those transactions secure, transparent and under user control.

“Visa’s announcement is a signal that agentic commerce is getting closer to the point of transaction, not just discovery,” Kumar Senthil, co-founder and chief executive of agentic commerce platform firmly.ai, told SiliconANGLE in an email. “The challenge for retailers is that most commerce infrastructure was built for consumers clicking through a website, not agents interpreting product data, checking availability, comparing options and completing a purchase on behalf of the consumer. The merchants that win here will be the ones that make their products and checkout flows easier for agents to work with, while still protecting the control over pricing, checkout, fulfillment and the customer relationship.”

Image: Visa