Visa Companions with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Extra to Construct AI Purchasing Agent
Final 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 companions to fuse synthetic intelligence (AI) with funds and construct an AI agent that may assist customers full purchases from begin to end.
What Visa has in thoughts is an AI agent related to the person’s bank card and may observe directions like “Keep beneath $200 and e-book me a round-trip flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco for early August” or “Reorder my weekly grocery staples on Sunday.” These sorts of end-to-end duties are seen as the subsequent frontier for AI brokers, however they’ve hit friction concerning the payment step.
Visa’s Chief Product and Technique Officer, Jack Forestell, said: “The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are beginning to do a extremely good job on the buying and discovery dimension of the issue, however they’re having large hassle on funds. You get up to now the place the brokers actually simply flip it again round and say, ‘OK, you go purchase it.’”
Visa acknowledges that fixing this bottleneck requires having cost suppliers within the combine, which is why Visa is working with these firms to convey their imaginative and prescient to life.
The corporate imagines its agent being helpful for small, mundane purchases like restocking pantry gadgets and extra dynamic duties like planning journeys requiring the person to buy tickets.
While 2025 was supposed to be the “year of the AI agent,” we’re virtually midway by way of and albeit, issues have been fairly quiet on the AI agent entrance. My hunch is that a part of the delay has been technical, as Visa factors out, however one other piece of the equation is that AI brokers nonetheless really feel like a overseas idea to most AI customers. This most likely signifies that we might want to see some instructional campaigns that convey customers up to the mark on how they’ll use AI brokers.
Meta launches standalone AI App to compete with ChatGPT and Claude
In the meantime, Meta (NASDAQ: META) announced it should launch a standalone application for its generative AI system, Meta AI. This provides Meta AI its devoted interface, separate from Fb, Instagram, and WhatsApp chats, and aligns it with what customers have come to count on from different in style generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude.
Meta is positioning its AI as extra customized than opponents, primarily due to the distinctive knowledge it already has on customers. Since Meta can draw from exercise throughout its household of apps (Fb, Instagram, WhatsApp), it believes it could actually create tailor-made outputs which can be extra in tune with every person.
The brand new Meta AI app additionally features a social media-like facet known as the “Discover” feed. The Uncover part lets customers scroll by way of posts that give them a glimpse into how others use Meta AI and permits them to share their creations and prompts. In a approach, this offers us a glance into how AI-infused social platforms would possibly operate, which could possibly be of curiosity as there are at present rumors that OpenAI is building its AI-driven social network.
General, this can doubtless be a optimistic for Meta AI. Whereas integrating AI instantly into Instagram, Fb, and WhatsApp definitely gave Meta mass distribution from day one, it didn’t at all times translate right into a clean person expertise, particularly for energy customers or professionals making an attempt to get actual work carried out with AI. If you happen to’re a software program developer counting on AI to put in writing code, for instance, the very last thing you need is to dig by way of Messenger threads or WhatsApp chats to entry your AI assistant.
Apple companions with Anthropic to create inner ‘vibe coding’ platform
Additionally final week, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) revealed it’s partnering with Anthropic, the workforce behind Claude, to construct an inner “vibe coding” platform that leverages AI to put in writing, edit, and check code. Vibe coding is a brand new approach of constructing software program the place as a substitute of writing each line of code by hand, builders give AI prompts that specify what they need the app or characteristic to do and have the AI write the code for them. You begin with tough prompts, check what the AI offers you, and proceed to refine the directions till your product takes form. Vibe coding is shortly changing into a a lot sooner and resource-efficient strategy to construct a product; it’s intuitive and doesn’t require a CS diploma or years of programming expertise to construct a product.
This transfer by Apple aligns with a current development we’re seeing from vital names within the tech business. Earlier this 12 months, Y Combinator revealed that 25% of firms in its Winter 2025 batch mentioned AI wrote 95% of their code. Not lengthy after, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned that roughly 20% to 30% of the code in Microsoft’s inner repositories was written by AI.
This current transfer by Apple additional validates the concept artificial intelligence might be simply as efficient as a human software program engineer in relation to creating vital merchandise that serve tons of of thousands and thousands of individuals worldwide daily.
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