Visa says it has completed hundreds of secure AI initiated transactions with partners, signaling that agent driven shopping and checkout could reach mainstream consumers by the 2026 holiday season, raising both convenience and risk questions.
Visa says it has completed hundreds of secure AI initiated transactions with partners, signaling that agent driven shopping and checkout could reach mainstream consumers by the 2026 holiday season, raising both convenience and risk questions.
I don’t see how there’s really much room for improvement in terms of convenience. Buying things online is already very simple, typing in the thing you want to buy and sorting through some options. If you want to do it efficiently, it takes up very little time, although some people enjoy the process and choose to spend lots of time on it. Maybe for something like looking through many sites for the best price, that otherwise wouldn’t be worth the time?
That’s more or less where I sit on it. I think there’s a way to create a personal shopping assistant that would save people time, but the problem is I don’t make enough money to have a comfortable enough margin for the error rate it would certainly have, to speak nothing of whether it would find the prices I’d be satisfied with. I don’t know how many people are in affordable enough living situations where using this to save time would even be responsible.
And that’s assuming the agent is working in the best interests of the user, which we all know won’t be how this works. In general, I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with agentic AI spending my money without it being codified into law that AI agents must have a provable fiduciary duty to end users. As far as I know, no one’s even talking about that.