Synchrony Financial — the issuer behind store credit cards for Amazon, Walmart, and Lowe's — is partnering with OpenAI to let shoppers complete purchases directly inside ChatGPT, turning every AI conversation into a potential transaction and every purchase into a data point for algorithms to mine.
The industry calls it "agentic commerce" — letting software finish a purchase on your behalf instead of routing you to a retailer's website. The pitch is convenience. The reality is that Americans' spending habits, financing choices, and purchase histories get embedded inside chatbots operated by tech giants who already vacuum up search and browsing data. Regulators have nothing to say about it.
The technology isn't ready. Synchrony chief strategy officer Maran Nalluswami told CNBC that getting general-purpose cards working inside ChatGPT will take six to twelve months, and private-label store cards will take longer because each retailer has to be integrated separately. "What happens today is the transaction doesn't cleanly happen yet at the provider like OpenAI," Nalluswami said. "We want to ensure that if a transaction's going to happen in that ecosystem, our cards are loaded up in the right spots to ensure that that transaction finishes."
OpenAI has been assembling the plumbing regardless — signing deals with Stripe and embedding Visa for agent-initiated payments. Synchrony is hedging its bets, holding talks with Anthropic and Google about embedding cards in Claude and Gemini as well. Amazon, meanwhile, is pushing Alexa into the same territory. The common thread: every tech platform wants to be the toll booth between your wallet and the things you buy.
The money question is unresolved. Nobody has agreed how fees from a purchase completed inside ChatGPT should be divided among the retailer, the card issuer, and OpenAI. Nalluswami admitted the economics will need to be negotiated. In other words, corporations are fighting over who gets a cut of your spending before anyone has asked whether you want AI making purchases for you at all.
Consumers aren't sold. Both outlets report that shoppers remain wary of handing credit card information to an AI system or letting software complete a transaction on their behalf. That hesitation is treated as an obstacle to overcome, not a signal to respect.
In Europe, the problem is legal, not just commercial. TNW reports that agentic payments fall under PSD2's strong customer authentication rules, written on the assumption that a person authorizes a specific payee, amount, and moment — which is awkward for a product whose entire pitch is that you don't have to be there. No European supervisory guidance exists yet. In the U.S., there isn't even that much friction. No regulator has raised the question of whether delegating purchase authority to an AI agent satisfies existing consumer protection standards.
Synchrony is also launching a ChatGPT plugin to let consumers browse its marketplace deals and promotional financing offers — meaning the AI won't just process your payments, it'll upsell you on them.
The fight over fee splits will get resolved behind closed doors. The question that won't get answered in those rooms is whether Americans' financial privacy is worth more than the convenience of not clicking "checkout."
