Visa used its annual Payments Forum in San Francisco this week to lay out a clearer picture of how it sees the next generation of commerce taking shape — and where its infrastructure fits.
The message from chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell was direct: AI is transforming the front end of commerce, stablecoins are reshaping the back end, and Visa’s job is to make both work securely at global scale.
AI agents as a payment category
The most forward-looking set of announcements concerned AI agents. Visa is building tools specifically designed for an environment where autonomous agents initiate and complete transactions on behalf of users — a real and near-term shift that requires infrastructure the traditional payments system was not designed for.
Agent Score evaluates whether a merchant’s website is ready for AI agent interactions. The Agentic Directory is a registry of verified agents and merchants, providing a trust framework on both sides. The OpenAI partnership enables AI agents to initiate Visa payments within defined user permissions — with OpenAI providing the conversational interface and Visa delivering the underlying payment infrastructure.
Visa also demonstrated a proof-of-concept Command Line Interface that lets AI agents pay for digital services directly using tokenised credentials — an early signal of where developer-led commerce is heading. “We are working with the industry to make cards the best way to pay in the Command Line,” Forestell said.
The Large Transaction Model is an AI fraud detection system trained on billions of transactions, designed to reduce false declines while maintaining security — a balance the industry has historically struggled with.
From experiment to infrastructure
Visa’s stablecoin work has progressed from pilot to meaningful volume. The company settles approximately $7 billion in stablecoins annually through its network as of March 2026 — putting it among the largest stablecoin settlement rails by transaction volume.
The next phase involves extending stablecoin settlement pilots to acquirers and expanding the settlement window to seven days, enabling always-on value transfer. Visa is also building technology for tokenized deposits, allowing banks to convert traditional deposits into programmable digital money while keeping funds on balance sheet.
On the consumer side, more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs are live or in development globally.
The infrastructure problem
Across these announcements, a consistent theme: Visa is building modular, cloud-native capabilities that integrate with existing infrastructure rather than requiring banks and merchants to replace their systems wholesale. For issuers, the Pismo core banking platform offers a phased path away from legacy infrastructure. For merchants, Unified Checkout provides a single orchestration layer for card and non-card payments including AI-initiated transactions.
The thread is that Visa wants to be the trust and settlement layer regardless of how commerce is initiated — whether by a human, an AI agent, a stablecoin transaction, or a tokenized deposit. Whether that holds as blockchain-native payment infrastructure matures is the open question.