Visa announced a series of new initiatives Thursday at the Visa Payments Forum 2026 in San Francisco, covering everything from AI-driven commerce to programmable digital money and stablecoin settlements. The payments giant also revealed a partnership with OpenAI aimed at bringing conversational AI agents into the checkout process.
OpenAI partnership targets agentic commerce
Visa’s collaboration with OpenAI is designed to pair the AI firm’s conversational and agentic interfaces with Visa’s payment infrastructure. Under the arrangement, merchants will be able to obtain an “agent score” that determines whether AI agents can operate across their websites. Both merchants and agents will gain access to a directory of verified participants in agentic commerce. The system will also include a large transaction model — an AI model with improved fraud detection capabilities.
“We believe a growing share of creation and transactions will be led by developers using AI tools,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer.
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Token upgrades aim for smarter authorizations
Visa also said it’s upgrading its payment tokens, which are datasets that enable digital payments. It plans to boost the data and context included in those tokens, allowing for better authorization decisions. A new “token assurance signal” will be introduced — a dynamic trust score generated by evaluating token behavior through its lifecycle. The idea is to give issuers more confidence when approving or declining transactions.
Programmable money from traditional deposits
One of the more technical announcements involves a technology layer that Visa is building to turn traditional bank deposits into programmable digital money. The goal is to let banks keep pace with the speed of stablecoins without leaving conventional rails behind.
AI is transforming the front end of commerce.
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“Stablecoins are reshaping the back end,” Forestell said during the forum.
Stablecoin settlements expand across jurisdictions
Stablecoins — digital assets on blockchain rails typically pegged to the U.S. dollar — have seen explosive growth. According to Visa, volumes jumped from $565 billion in 2020 to $11 trillion by 2025, an annual growth rate of around 80%. Visa’s stablecoin capabilities currently support nine blockchains and have reached a $7 billion annualized settlement run rate. The company has been launching stablecoin settlement pilot programs across North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa.
Still, different jurisdictions continue to have varied regulatory clarity around stablecoins, creating risk of friction. That’s a hurdle the industry hasn’t fully resolved, and Visa’s expansion will depend on how those rules evolve.
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Its announcements reflect a broader push to embed itself in the next generation of digital payments — whether that means AI agents buying things on behalf of users, or banks issuing programmable dollars.
Visa isn’t just processing transactions anymore.
It’s trying to build the rails for whatever comes next.