Last week my five-year-old HP laptop decided it was time to let me go, and while I was doing my usual zigzag through the streets of Rome, it threw itself under the wheels of a passing bus like some metal Anna Karenina, no warning, no drama beforehand, just gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back home, I went shopping around the usual laptop vendors, but after about five seconds, helped along by a healthy dose of denial, I abandoned every principle I claim to hold and asked ChatGPT: “What would you buy?” In no time it had run an analysis of thirty laptops, flagging discounts, delivery times, and still suggesting I wait four months for the new lineup that promises miracles. Being from Liguria, the famously thrifty corner of Italy, I’m genetically wired to freeze up the moment I have to click “pay now.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I asked my little AI if it could just buy it for me directly. The answer to my rhetorical question landed colder than expected: “Not today, but probably in about six months…” I pictured a tiny Fredric Brown cracking up with laughter, like something out of a Lynch film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A small, defiant tune about keeping your hands off someone else’s money played in my head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For over twenty years, online commerce has had one real question: how do you convince a person to buy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We built faster websites, more intuitive mobile apps, recommendation engines, one-click payment systems, SEO campaigns, personalized ads, and algorithms that could surface exactly what we wanted, and even what we didn’t know we wanted yet. Everything was built around one very specific protagonist: the human customer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was yesterday, but it already feels like a century ago. AI’s arrival changed everything, and at this point every SEO playbook out there is good for little more than a coaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The announcement of Visa’s partnership with OpenAI marks the first concrete step toward a new phase of the digital economy: Agentic Commerce, where we no longer make the purchase ourselves but hand it off to an intelligent agent acting on our behalf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It might sound like a simple evolution of ChatGPT. In reality, it’s a shift comparable to the birth of e-commerce itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From “Tap to Pay” to Tapped Out Visa is working to integrate its payment infrastructure directly into OpenAI’s AI agents. That means an intelligent assistant won’t just suggest which TV to buy or which flight to book anymore, it’ll be able to carry the whole chain through to the final step: payment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine asking:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n“Plan me a weekend in Barcelona for under 700 euros.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Today, ChatGPT can help compare hotels, flights, and reviews, but it still leaves the actual booking to us, which is exactly why every travel-booking site out there is scrambling to figure out its next move. Tomorrow, the flow will look completely different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The AI agent will analyze our preferences, compare hundreds of offers in seconds, check availability, verify the budget, use an authorized card, and complete the purchase automatically, before anyone else in the house even has a chance to weigh in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We’ll just need to approve the transaction, or for certain categories of spending, we might delegate the decision entirely. With all the risk that comes with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
E-Commerce vs. Agent Commerce Looking back at the last thirty years, the progression is surprisingly linear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the nineties, the internet taught us to search for information, a beautiful global storefront where people bought from Amazon and sent their payment details by mail, sometimes by genuinely strange methods. There’s a great video where Bezos tells that story himself and can’t stop laughing about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n