Visa and OpenAI Unlock Agentic Commerce

Visa and OpenAI Unlock Agentic Commerce

Visa and OpenAI partnered to make it easier for developers and merchants to accept Visa payments initiated by artificial intelligence agents.

The companies’ collaboration will enable secure payments across OpenAI, with Visa providing its global network, credentialing capabilities and security infrastructure to support agentic commerce for consumers and businesses, Visa said in a Wednesday (June 10) press release.

Visa and OpenAI will also explore enterprise applications, including developer-focused ones powered by OpenAI’s coding agent, Codex, as well as additional automated and conversational workflows, according to the release.

The transactions enabled by this partnership will operate within clearly defined user permissions, policies and controls, including spending limits, merchant categories or required approvals. They will also use tokenized Visa credentials, real-time authorization and fraud monitoring, per the release.

“As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless,” Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said in the release. “That’s the infrastructure we’re building with partners like OpenAI.”

Marco Mahrus, head of partnerships, commerce at OpenAI, said in the release that agents will play an increasingly important role in purchases, payments and more complex transactions.

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“By integrating with Visa Intelligent Commerce, we’re building the infrastructure for secure, transparent and user-controlled agentic transactions, helping people do more with AI agents while maintaining confidence that payments are being handled safely and securely,” Mahrus said.

Visa unveiled the Visa Intelligent Commerce program in April 2025, saying that it opens the network’s rails to developers building AI agents that search, recommend and pay on behalf of consumers.

Five modules included in the program at launch delivered authentication, tokenization, payment instructions, personalization, and transaction signals that trigger risk controls and aid dispute resolution.

Mark Nelsen, who was Visa’s global head of consumer products at the time and is now the company’s head of product, commercial and money movement solutions, discussed Visa Intelligent Commerce with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster at the time of the program’s launch.

“This is going to transform shopping and buying,” Nelsen said in the interview posted in April 2025. “We’re letting AI developers and engineers use the Visa network to allow AI agents to find and buy on [the consumer’s] behalf in a seamless and safe way.”

In the PYMNTS Intelligence eBook “AI Changes Commerce. Visa Wants Trust to Scale With It,” four Visa executives told PYMNTS that AI is reshaping payments, fraud prevention, banking infrastructure and commerce.

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