What if your AI assistant doesn’t just recommend a flight for an upcoming trip but also pays for it on your behalf?

“Welcome to the future of possible,” Visa CEO Ryan McInerney teased on Wednesday, shortly after taking the stage at Visa’s Product Drop press event in San Francisco.

Visa officially took the wraps off its Visa Intelligent Commerce initiative, a suite of tools and technologies to facilitate AI-based shopping.

With your consent, of course, Visa partners like OpenAI – the parent company to ChatGPT – will soon work with “AI agents” to research, select, and even buy that flight for you. You could even set parameters, such as a price threshold (if the fare drops below say $400), as well as no stopovers or redeyes.

Until now, AI agents could curate personalized recommendations for products and services but would stop short of transacting with merchants.

This is the full-circle solution Visa is aiming to provide.

“Today, when your AI agent displays your itinerary, makes all kinds of recommendations for you, restaurants and excursions, it’s pretty magical,” conceded McInerney, referring to a hypothetical scenario for an upcoming vacation. “I’m going say to the AI, ‘This looks fantastic, let’s book it,’ and then my agent is going to tell me, ‘I’m sorry. I’m not fully trained to make payments for you, but I could direct you to websites where you can make these purchases,’ and so this is where all the fun currently ends.”

“But it’s actually a pretty solvable problem, (as) we could........

© Edmonton Sun