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Artificial intelligence “agents” are supposed to be more than chatbots. The tech industry has spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf.

So far, they’re not doing much.

Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents — successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers — could find and buy you a sweater, weekly groceries or an airplane ticket.

“We think this could be really important,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”

Visa announced Wednesday it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers — among them U.S. companies Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France’s Mistral — to connect their AI systems to Visa’s payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative. Pilot projects begin Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year.

The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it.

For emerging AI companies, Visa’s backing could also boost their chances of competing with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are developing their own AI agents.

The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what it calls agentic AI, though few are yet found in the real world. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models — the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarize documents or help people code. Trained on huge troves of data, they can scour the internet and bring back recommendations for things to buy, but they have a harder time going beyond that.

“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,” Forestell said. “You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, ‘OK, you go buy it.’

Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases.

“The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves,” Forestell said. “That’s why we started working with them.”

The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the U.S., making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant.

Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay that turn their phones into a credit card. A similar process of vetting someone’s digital credentials would authorize AI agents to work on a customer’s behalf, in a way Forestell says must assure buyers, banks and merchants that the transactions are legitimate and that Visa will handle disputes.

Forestell said that doesn’t mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people — like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists — or are too complicated, like travel bookings. In those situations, some people might want an agent that “just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us,” Forestell said.

Other shopping experiences, such as for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons, Forestell said. In that case, he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background.

And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit $1.21 trillion at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York.

Forestell says consumers will give their AI agents clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human is still in control. At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to make sure they are OK with a specific airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might get more autonomy to “go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B,” he said.

Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer’s consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases.

“Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer. “When we generate a recommendation -- say you’re asking, ‘What are the best laptops?’ — we would know what are other transactions you’ve made and the revealed preferences from that.”

Perplexity’s chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it’s still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko says. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google’s internet browser, Chrome, if the U.S. forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case.

The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.3% annual pace from January through March, the first drop in three years, as President Donald Trump’s trade wars disrupted business. First-quarter growth was slowed by a surge in imports as companies in the United States tried to bring in foreign goods before Trump imposed massive tariffs.

The January-March drop in gross domestic product — the nation’s output of goods and services — reversed a 2.4% gain in the last three months of 2024. Imports grew at a 41% pace, fastest since 2020, and shaved 5 percentage points off first-quarter growth. Consumer spending also slowed sharply — 1.8% growth from 4% in October-December last year. Federal government spending plunged 5.1% in the first quarter.

Forecasters surveyed by the data firm FactSet had, on average, expected the economy to eke out 0.8% growth in the first quarter, but many expected GDP to fall. Financial markets sank on the report. The Dow Jones tumbled 400 points at the opening bell shortly after the GDP numbers were released. The S&P 500 dropped 1.5% and the Nasdaq composite fell 2%.

Business investment rose at a 21.9% clip as companies poured money into equipment. And a category within the GDP data that measures the economy’s underlying strength rose at a healthy 3% annual rate from January through March, up from 2.9% in the fourth quarter of 2024. This category includes consumer spending and private investment but excludes volatile items like exports, inventories and government spending.

The surge in imports — fastest since 1972 outside COVID-19 economic disruptions — is likely to reverse in the second quarter, removing a weight on GDP. For that reason, Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics forecasts that April-June growth will rebound to a 2% gain.

But many economists say that Trump’s massive import taxes — the erratic way he’s rolled them out — will hurt growth in the second half of the year and that recession risks are rising.

Wednesday’s report also showed an increase in prices that is likely to worry the Federal Reserve which is still trying to cool inflation after a severe pandemic run-up. The Fed’s favored inflation gauge – the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, price index – rose at an annual rate of 3.6%, up from 2.4% in the fourth quarter. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core PC inflation registered 3.5%, compared with 2.6% from October-December. The central bank wants to see inflation at 2%.

The first-quarter GDP numbers “highlight the bind that the Federal Reserve is in,” Ryan Sweet of Oxford Economics wrote in a commentary. The Fed must weigh whether to cut interest rates to support economic growth or leave rates high because of elevated inflation. “The economy was essentially stagnant in the first three months of the year while growth in headline and core inflation accelerated, fanning concerns of stagflation.’’

Trump inherited a solid economy that had grown steadily despite high interest rates imposed by the Fed in 2022 and 2023 to fight inflation. His erratic trade policies — including 145% tariffs on China — have paralyzed businesses and threatened to raise prices and hurt consumers.

Democrats were quick to blame Trump for disrupting several years of solid economic growth. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said: “100 days into his presidency, Donald Trump’s red-light, green-light tariffs are shrinking our economy, with businesses stockpiling imports in anticipation of tariff doomsday.″

There is potential evidence emerging that the solid job market, a pillar of the U.S. economy during the pandemic recession, may be weakening.

On Wednesday, payroll provider ADP reported that companies added just 62,000 jobs in April, about half of what was expected, and down from 147,000 in March. That could be a signal that businesses may be taking a more cautious approach to hiring amid uncertainty over tariffs. Still, the ADP figures often diverge from the government’s jobs reports, which arrive Friday.

Employers in the education and health, information technology, and business and professional services industries all cut jobs. Business and professional services include sectors such as engineering, accounting and advertising.

“Unease is the word of the day,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP. “It can be difficult to make hiring decisions in such an environment.”