AI Shopping Agents: Your New Personal Shopper

[Drfun]

Recently, Visa and Mastercard just announced frameworks for AI agents to make purchases on your behalf. Visa's "Intelligent Commerce" and Mastercard's "Agent Pay" will tokenize your credentials and allow AI systems to shop for you within preset limits – without exposing your actual card data.

You'll soon be able to delegate routine purchases to an AI assistant that can use your credit card safely. For example, instead of ordering office supplies yourself, you could tell your AI, "We need more printer paper," and it would find the best options, make the purchase, and arrange delivery—all without you having to visit a website.

Real-world analogy: It's like having a trusted assistant with a company credit card, except it's AI. You set the spending limits and guidelines, and the AI handles the rest, saving you time on routine purchases.

Why it matters now: This infrastructure is critical as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others add shopping features to their platforms. It represents a shift from AI as a research tool to AI as an active participant in commerce, potentially changing how both consumers and businesses approach online shopping.

The bottom line: Within the next year, shopping through AI assistants will likely become as common as online shopping is today—businesses need to prepare their digital storefronts to be "AI discoverable."