Visa and OpenAI have announced a strategic collaboration to enable secure digital payments within agentic AI experiences, marking a significant step toward integrating commerce directly into AI-powered interactions.

The partnership, unveiled at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, will combine Visa’s global payments network, tokenization technology, and security infrastructure with OpenAI’s AI platforms to support a new generation of agentic commerce experiences. The goal is to allow AI agents to facilitate purchases and payments on behalf of users while operating within predefined permissions and controls.

Under the agreement, Visa’s payment capabilities will be embedded into OpenAI-powered experiences, providing developers and merchants with a streamlined way to accept transactions initiated by AI agents. The companies said transactions will be governed by user-defined parameters such as spending limits, merchant preferences, and approval requirements.

The initiative builds on Visa’s broader Visa Intelligent Commerce strategy, which focuses on extending payment capabilities into emerging digital environments where AI agents increasingly serve as intermediaries between consumers and businesses.

To support trust and security, transactions will rely on tokenized Visa credentials, real-time authorization, and fraud monitoring technologies. The companies said these safeguards are designed to ensure that AI-driven payments remain transparent, secure, and under user control.

In addition to consumer payment experiences, the companies plan to explore enterprise use cases, including developer-focused applications powered by OpenAI’s Codex and conversational workflows that integrate payment functionality into AI-driven business processes.

The collaboration highlights growing efforts across the technology and financial services sectors to establish the infrastructure needed for AI agents to participate safely in commercial transactions, as conversational AI increasingly becomes a gateway to digital services and purchasing decisions.