When our previous entry covered ChatGPT's planned overhaul, the Visa partnership was listed as a coming detail. It is now confirmed. On June 10, Visa announced it had wired its payment network directly into ChatGPT, making it possible for an AI agent to complete a purchase on a user's behalf at any merchant that accepts Visa. That is roughly 175 million locations worldwide.
The way it works: users pre-authorise the agent with spending limits and merchant restrictions, and Visa generates a single-use payment token for each transaction rather than exposing a card number. The setup is deliberately cautious. Visa's own chief product and strategy officer said that at first, most transactions will still loop in a human for final approval, but the system is designed to make that loop optional as users build confidence.
This is not OpenAI's first attempt at in-app purchasing. It launched a feature called Instant Checkout in late 2025 that let ChatGPT shop across the web. Walmart, one of the early partners, later pulled out. The Visa deal is structurally different because it does not require merchants to build a dedicated integration: any business that already accepts Visa is, in principle, reachable by the agent from day one.
The broader product story has also sharpened since the overhaul was reported. The redesign carries an internal codename, "Aria." The person responsible for making it real is Thibault Sottiaux, a Belgian engineer who built OpenAI's coding tool Codex before being given oversight of all of OpenAI's core products. Codex now has more than 5 million weekly active users, a sixfold increase since February, and roughly 20% of its users are non-technical workers, growing three times faster than the developer segment.
Sottiaux's job is to merge Codex's task-completing engine into ChatGPT's consumer front end, producing one product that handles questions, runs code, books travel, creates designs, and now processes payments. The confirmed partner list spans Canva, Booking.com, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, Zillow, and more than 90 companies in total. A senior OpenAI employee put the internal direction plainly: "Chat is dead."
To free up resources for this push, OpenAI shut down its standalone video app Sora in April. The app had peaked at around one million active users and was burning roughly one million dollars a day to run. The Sora team has moved to research work on physical robotics. The compute that powered Sora is now going to Codex and the super app. A $1 billion partnership with Disney, which was built around the Sora app, ended when the shutdown was announced, reportedly less than an hour before it became public.
For business operators, there are two things worth tracking. The first is the Visa integration itself. If your customers start using AI agents for purchasing decisions, they will not see your website, your promotional emails, or your display advertising. The agent reads structured product data: specifications, pricing, and metadata. How your products show up in that environment is not a design question; it is a data quality question. Businesses that sell through any channel that accepts Visa are now, technically, reachable by this agent.
The second is the reliability question. OpenAI's earlier agents, including the Operator tool that tried to navigate websites on a user's behalf, never saw significant adoption because the technology was not reliable enough for real-world use. Sottiaux acknowledged this directly, saying those attempts were "too early." The new claim is that the underlying models have improved enough to make agents genuinely trustworthy. That claim will be tested in the weeks ahead when Aria begins rolling out to ChatGPT's roughly 900 million weekly users.
The IPO context has not changed. OpenAI is targeting a listing as early as September 2026, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley advising. The platform story and the payments story together make a more investable case than a chat product alone. Whether the execution matches the pitch is what the next few months will show.