Betting that people will soon grow more comfortable having artificial intelligence (AI) agents shop for groceries, plane tickets or diapers on their behalf, payments giant Visa said on Wednesday that it has embedded its payment network inside of ChatGPT, empowering the chatbot to independently shop and complete transactions.

It means AI agents can not only recommend products, but complete the purchase on the user's behalf at potentially any merchant that accepts Visa. The payment network's previous attempts at this technological leap were confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants.

It is not OpenAI's first attempt at e-commerce. The company late last year announced Instant Checkout, which allowed ChatGPT to scour the Internet for a specific item like a digital personal shopper. But the process was prone to errors and was not widely adopted by merchants due to the fee that OpenAI was charging merchants. The company retired Instant Checkout in March.