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Visa Partners with OpenAI, Microsoft, and More to Build AI Shopping Agent
Last week, Visa (NASDAQ: V) announced a partnership with Anthropic, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), OpenAI, Perplexity, Mistral AI, IBM (NASDAQ: IBM), Stripe, and Samsung (NASDAQ: SSNLF) to lean on these partners to fuse artificial intelligence (AI) with payments and build an AI agent that can help consumers complete purchases from start to finish.
What Visa has in mind is an AI agent connected to the user’s credit card and can follow instructions like “Stay under $200 and book me a round-trip flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco for early August” or “Reorder my weekly grocery staples on Sunday.” These kinds of end-to-end tasks are seen as the next frontier for AI agents, but they’ve hit friction regarding the payment step.
Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Jack Forestell, said: “The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a really good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments. You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, ‘OK, you go buy it.'”
Visa recognizes that solving this bottleneck requires having payment providers in the mix, which is why Visa is working with these companies to bring their vision to life.
The company imagines its agent being useful for small, mundane purchases like restocking pantry items and more dynamic tasks like planning trips requiring the user to purchase tickets.
While 2025 was supposed to be the “year of the AI agent,” we’re almost halfway through and frankly, things have been pretty quiet on the AI agent front. My hunch is that part of the delay has been technical, as Visa points out, but another piece of the equation is that AI agents still feel like a foreign concept to most AI users. This probably means that we will need to see some educational campaigns that bring users up to speed on how they can use AI agents.
Meta launches standalone AI App to compete with ChatGPT and Claude
Meanwhile, Meta (NASDAQ: META) announced it will launch a standalone application for its generative AI system, Meta AI. This gives Meta AI its dedicated interface, separate from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp chats, and aligns it with what users have come to expect from other popular generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude.
Meta is positioning its AI as more personalized than competitors, primarily because of the unique data it already has on users. Since Meta can draw from activity across its family of apps (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), it believes it can create tailored outputs that are more in tune with each user.
The new Meta AI app also includes a social media-like aspect called the “Discover” feed. The Discover section lets users scroll through posts that give them a glimpse into how others use Meta AI and allows them to share their creations and prompts. In a way, this gives us a look into how AI-infused social platforms might function, which could be of interest as there are currently rumors that OpenAI is building its AI-driven social network.
Overall, this will likely be a positive for Meta AI. While integrating AI directly into Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp certainly gave Meta mass distribution from day one, it didn’t always translate into a smooth user experience, especially for power users or professionals trying to get real work done with AI. If you’re a software developer relying on AI to write code, for example, the last thing you want is to dig through Messenger threads or WhatsApp chats to access your AI assistant.
Apple partners with Anthropic to create internal ‘vibe coding’ platform
Also last week, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) revealed it’s partnering with Anthropic, the team behind Claude, to build an internal “vibe coding” platform that leverages AI to write, edit, and test code. Vibe coding is a new way of building software where instead of writing every line of code by hand, developers give AI prompts that explain what they want the app or feature to do and have the AI write the code for them. You start with rough prompts, test what the AI gives you, and continue to refine the instructions until your product takes shape. Vibe coding is quickly becoming a much faster and resource-efficient way to build a product; it is intuitive and doesn’t require a CS degree or years of programming experience to build a product.
This move by Apple aligns with a recent trend we are seeing from significant names in the tech industry. Earlier this year, Y Combinator revealed that 25% of companies in its Winter 2025 batch said AI wrote 95% of their code. Not long after, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that roughly 20% to 30% of the code in Microsoft’s internal repositories was written by AI.
This recent move by Apple further validates the idea that artificial intelligence can be just as effective as a human software engineer when it comes to creating significant products that serve hundreds of millions of people worldwide every day.
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