Visa has announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to integrate its global payment network into OpenAI’s products and platforms, positioning the two companies as early infrastructure partners in the emerging agentic commerce space. The announcement was made at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco on 10 June 2026.
Image source: Visa Inc
Under the agreement, Visa will provide its network, tokenization capabilities and security infrastructure to support agent-initiated transactions across OpenAI environments. Transactions will operate within user-defined parameters, including spending limits, merchant category restrictions and approval requirements, with tokenized credentials and real-time fraud monitoring applied throughout.
“AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did,” said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa. “As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless. That’s the infrastructure we’re building with partners like OpenAI.”
Marco Mahrus, Head of Partnerships for Commerce at OpenAI, said the integration is aimed at building the foundation for agent-driven transactions. “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.”
Beyond Checkout: Where the Integration Applies
The timing of the announcement carries a significant caveat. OpenAI quietly discontinued its Instant Checkout feature in March 2026, having launched it just few months earlier. The feature, which enabled purchases directly within the ChatGPT interface, never scaled beyond a small number of participating merchants. Fewer than a dozen merchants had integrated the tools, and a compliance gap around US state sales tax collection remained unresolved at the time of its discontinuation.
The Visa partnership is therefore not primarily about enabling a direct checkout function within ChatGPT. Instead, the collaboration’s stated scope is broader, covering enterprise applications including developer-focused workflows powered by Codex, as well as more automated and conversational commerce environments — areas where AI agents may initiate or facilitate payments without a human completing a traditional checkout flow.
For merchants and developers, the practical pathway runs through Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect platform. That infrastructure supports acceptance of payments initiated through several emerging agent protocols, including Trusted Agent Protocol, Machine Payments Protocol, Agentic Commerce Protocol and Universal Commerce Protocol, and is designed to work with multiple network token providers. Merchants connecting through the platform can also expose product catalogues, including descriptions, specifications and pricing, to AI platforms, enabling discovery and purchase within agent-driven environments. The solution supports both Visa and non-Visa card payments, broadening adoption potential across the wider ecosystem.
Third-party payment providers are already part of the infrastructure layer. When a purchase is completed, the merchant accepts or declines the order and processes the payment via their existing provider, handling fulfilment and customer support as they do today. Stripe underpins the Agentic Commerce Protocol developed by OpenAI, meaning established payment processors retain a role in the transaction stack even where Visa’s network sits above them.
Large Players Move First
The Visa-OpenAI partnership reflects a broader pattern in how agentic payments are developing as an industry. Unlike previous cycles of payments innovation where infrastructure standards were often established by smaller fintech companies before larger players entered, agentic commerce appears to be consolidating around established technology and financial networks from the outset.
Visa’s Intelligent Commerce initiative already counts Microsoft, IBM, Anthropic, Samsung and Stripe among its partners, alongside OpenAI. On the protocol side, Google has introduced its own Universal Commerce Protocol, backed by a separate coalition of partners, while OpenAI and Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol operates as a competing open standard. The result is a landscape where the principal actors in network infrastructure, AI platforms and payment processing are entities that already operate at a global scale.
Visa’s Intelligent Commerce Connect is described as network-, protocol- and token vault-agnostic, a positioning that allows it to sit across competing standards. However, the degree to which that compatibility reduces or entrenches the dominance of the platforms it connects with remains an open question as commercial arrangements solidify.
Visa is currently working with more than 100 partners across the commerce ecosystem, with over 20 agents and agent enablers integrating directly with Visa Intelligent Commerce. Broader availability of Intelligent Commerce Connect is expected across 2026, with the product currently in pilot with a select group of partners.
