Visa has unveiled a broad set of AI, stablecoin and token capabilities at the Visa Payments Forum 2026 in San Francisco, positioning the payments network as the trust and infrastructure layer for the next generation of intelligent and programmable commerce.
The announcements centre on two structural shifts that Visa says are simultaneously transforming the payments industry: AI reshaping how transactions are initiated and authorised on the front end, and stablecoins modernising how money moves on the back end.
AI Agents and Agentic Commerce
Visa’s Intelligent Commerce platform — designed to allow AI agents to securely discover, initiate and complete transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses — received several new additions. These include Agent Score, which lets merchants evaluate whether their websites are ready for AI agent navigation; Agentic Directory, a verified registry of trusted agents and merchants within the ecosystem; and a Large Transaction Model trained on billions of transactions to improve fraud detection while reducing false declines.
Visa also announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to enable AI agents to initiate Visa payments within defined user permissions, with OpenAI providing the conversational interface and Visa supplying the payment infrastructure underneath.
“AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end. Visa’s role is to enable it to work securely, reliably and at global scale, for every participant in the ecosystem.” — Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Visa
Stablecoin Settlement at Scale
On the stablecoin side, Visa disclosed that it has moved billions of dollars through VisaNet using stablecoins, with an annualised run rate of approximately US$7 billion as of March 2026. The company is expanding seven-day settlement pilots to acquirers and growing its stablecoin-linked card programme, which now has more than 160 programmes live or in development globally.
Visa also announced plans to build the technology layer enabling banks to convert traditional deposits into programmable digital money — a move framed as giving banks the speed and flexibility of stablecoins while keeping funds on balance sheet and under regulatory control.
Token Enhancements for AI-Driven Commerce
Visa’s token infrastructure is also being upgraded to embed more data, context and identity signals into payment credentials. A new token assurance signal evaluates token usage throughout its lifecycle to generate a trust indicator for each transaction — giving issuers stronger signals for authorisation decisions and reducing friction for legitimate consumers while minimising false declines for merchants.
