Visa and OpenAI have announced a strategic collaboration aimed at bringing Visa payments into AI-powered commerce experiences, a move that signals how quickly major payment networks and AI companies are trying to build infrastructure for transactions initiated by software agents. The companies said the partnership was announced at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco.
Under the agreement, Visa will provide its global payments network, credentialing capabilities, and security infrastructure to support what the companies describe as agentic commerce across OpenAI platforms. The partnership is tied to Visa Intelligent Commerce, a broader initiative focused on extending secure payment capabilities into new digital environments.
The arrangement is designed to let developers and merchants accept Visa payments initiated by AI agents inside OpenAI experiences. Visa said its role will include the network, tokenization, and risk capabilities needed to support those transactions, while the integration is meant to give businesses a more streamlined path to handling AI-driven payments.
The companies also said transactions will operate within user-defined permissions, policies, and controls. Those controls may include spending limits, merchant category restrictions, or required approvals, with payments relying on tokenized Visa credentials, real-time authorization, and fraud monitoring. The stated goal is to make agent-based payments more secure and transparent as AI tools take on a larger role in how people complete commercial tasks.
Visa is framing the partnership as part of a much larger shift in digital commerce. Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, said AI will change commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology and argued that payment systems need to be trusted, secure, and seamless as AI agents become more active economic participants.
OpenAI is presenting the collaboration in similar terms. Marco Mahrus, head of partnerships for commerce at OpenAI, said commerce will increasingly happen in more places and in more ways, with agents taking on a larger role in helping people complete tasks that involve money, from purchases and payments to more complex transactions. He said the integration is intended to support secure, transparent, and user-controlled agentic transactions.
The agreement also reaches beyond payments alone. Visa and OpenAI said they will explore enterprise applications connected to the partnership, including developer-focused experiences powered by Codex as well as more automated and conversational workflows. That suggests the collaboration is not only about checkout experiences, but also about how businesses and developers may build commerce features into AI-native systems.
For Visa, the partnership is another attempt to ensure that new commerce channels still run through its network and security stack. For OpenAI, it is a step toward making AI systems more directly useful in transactions rather than only in search, writing, or assistant functions. The tie-up also points to a broader competitive question now facing the payments and AI sectors alike: who will control the transaction layer when software agents begin acting on behalf of users.
If the collaboration develops as planned, it could help define how agentic commerce is structured, especially around permissions, security, and merchant acceptance. For now, the announcement is one of the clearest signs yet that the next phase of AI product development is moving beyond chat and productivity into the infrastructure of payments and digital commerce.
