The very idea of handing over a credit card to an AI shopper and letting it buy stuff for you sounds, on the surface, kind of crazy.
While the idea of AI shopping might sound like something out of a 1960s cartoon like “The Jetsons” —wild and futuristic—it’s already becoming a reality. You might be concerned about something as personal as your credit card, but the concept is not as crazy as it seems. In fact, it’s already starting to happen.
In the spring, Visa announced that it was working on Visa Intelligent Commerce, an AI initiative that would allow Visa credit card holders to engage in AI shopping. That is, as Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said in a press release, “Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf. These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well.”
So how could AI shopping work?
How AI shopping may work in the future
First of all, AI shopping is already here, sort of, says Richard Reichgut, head of business development at Polyguard, a New York City-based company that offers a product designed to block AI-powered fraud from individuals and businesses.
“We’re already seeing the early signals of how AI will transform shopping, and it’s only accelerating,” Reichgut says.
By early signals, Reichgut is referring to chatbots that help consumers with customer service or purchasing decisions on websites – and how voice-activated assistants like Siri and Alexa will order whatever you want.
“In the near future, you might walk into a store, or open an app, and be joined by a digital being: a shopper bot that knows your preferences, your size, your past purchases, even your mood. It acts like a trusted assistant, helping you make decisions and, in some cases, making them for you,” Reichgut says.
Right. It’s that last part, an AI program making shopping decisions for you that might have you a bit unsettled. If nothing else, shopping is often fun. Do we really need to outsource everything to AI?
Apparently so, and while you may or may not be clamoring for AI shopping, plenty of people are, according to Rubail Birwadker, the senior vice president and global head of growth at Visa.
“We’re always evaluating the next trend or technology that could reshape commerce – and right now, that’s generative AI,” Birwadker says. “ChatGPT has more than 400 million weekly active users, so the consumer demand for these platforms and engaging with AI agents is clearly there.”
So far, he says, AI agents “help largely with product discovery.” But down the road, Birwadker says, “With Visa Intelligent Commerce, we’ll make it possible for consumers to buy right from an AI platform, linking the global demand for AI-enabled support with the ubiquity and ease of payments that consumers have come to expect from the Visa brand.”
Imagine you’re chatting with an AI like ChatGPT, Claude, or even one that doesn’t exist yet. You might mention how you never get to stop and smell the roses. Then, you could simply ask it to buy some for you—under $50 and ethically sourced.
When will AI shopping be here?
Well, it’s a gradual process. As Reichgut observed, AI shopping is already here, but it’s speeding up and evolving. As for Visa credit cards being used with AI platforms, Birwadker says, “Testing is already underway in North America, with several of our partners actively coding to the Visa Intelligent Commerce APIs and conducting trials in our sandbox environment. These early efforts are laying the groundwork for broader adoption, which is anticipated to scale significantly next year.”
So, sometime in 2026 and definitely by 2027, you should be able to outsource at least some of your shopping to AI.
Birwadker says that all Visa cards, credit and debit, will be enabled.
Why AI shopping could be just what you need
While shopping is often fun, it isn’t always. You can probably think of plenty of times you’ve wondered how much of your life you’ve wasted, standing in a long line to reach somebody at a cash register. (If AI can be taught to wait in line at the DMV, boy, that would be a gift to humanity.)
As Reichgut says, “These AI agents – or digital beings – can streamline the shopping experience, especially for routine or time-consuming tasks. Imagine sending your digital shopper a quick voice command to buy your kids’ back-to-school clothes or replenish your pantry, and it does exactly that – seamlessly and efficiently.”
If you hate grocery shopping, in theory, you could almost completely eliminate that chore. You have your AI shopping assistant buy your stuff, and your supermarket delivers your food. All you have to do is put everything away, until you someday have a robot butler that can do that for you.
Why AI shopping may not be what you need
There are potential downsides to the idea of allowing AI to take your credit card and shop, however. Reichgut asks, “As these bots become more autonomous, how do we verify that the actions they take were truly authorized by the user?” He offers this example: “If your shopper bot hands off your credit card to a cashier bot – another AI – to finalize a transaction, who’s accountable when something goes wrong?”
He says that the risks are subtle but serious: “Permissions glitches, session hijacking, or even malicious bots impersonating yours. We need built-in mechanisms for transparency, verification, and proof of intent. Otherwise, as digital beings start to act on our behalf, we may not even know when – or why- a purchase was made.”
Brian King, associate professor of computer science at Bucknell University and faculty fellow for Bucknell’s Dominguez Center for Data Science, is also wondering about the potential negatives. He says that the Visa pilot project is “fascinating,” and he is jazzed by the “promise” of AI shopping and says that it’ll likely change retail much in the same way Amazon and online websites transformed how we buy stuff.
But, King says, before consumers jump on any AI shopping bandwagon, they may want to consider downsides such as the environment.
“This is something very few seem interested in talking about,” King says. “Data centers are the biggest drivers of energy consumption today. Despite the progress we’ve been making as a society to go green, we really are not seeing energy consumption dropping, and AI is why. These models will be huge, and because of the promise of autonomous shopping, many companies will be unnecessarily training their own models, duplicating efforts and thus having a multiplicative effect on the power grid. Competition is good, but with training AI models, it has a real impact.”
But even if the environment isn’t a concern for most consumers, King says that he could envision an AI program “hallucinating” a credit card purchase. “Surely, there will be external safeguards in place to ensure questionable purchase suggestions don’t get pushed through automatically,” he says.
King also frets about privacy and security, as handing over your credit card to an AI shopper would give companies even more insight into your private purchases. “Are we OK with this?” he asks, admitting that we almost don’t have a choice in the matter anyway.
“More companies have clauses buried in the agreements that by using their web services, you essentially agree to let them access your data. As a society, we seem to have become numb to the notion of privacy,” he says.
King also wonders about the credit card security involved when you give all of that information to an AI shopper.
“How often do we hear about another data breach, exposing some part of our personal data on the dark web for sale?” he asks. “The amount of your data needed to make these agents learn shopping patterns is unprecedented. Data centers are storing copies of your data for training purposes, and it’s only a matter of time before yet another breach takes place at another center.”
AI shopping is coming, ready or not
Many of the concerns King points out are being worked on, at least at Visa, according to Birwadker. “Addressing trust and consumer privacy issues with AI agents is top of the list,” Birwadker says.
And whatever you think of AI shopping, you may end up embracing it far more than you might initially think. After all, if you’re old enough, you may remember a time before phones had cameras, and when the first phone cameras debuted, you may well have thought, “How’s that going to be useful?”
Even King, who sees plenty that could go wrong with AI shopping and credit cards, says that plenty could go right: “Anything that can make it easier for us to not deal with mundane tasks such as shopping for our weekly groceries would be nice.”
