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Visa Inc. announced multiple technological initiatives this week that aim to enhance the roles of artificial intelligence, stablecoins and tokens in payments, including usage of the ChatGPT AI program.
The plethora of announcements came at the Visa Payments Forum 2026 in San Francisco. “AI is transforming the front end of commerce,” Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, said in a statement. “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.”
A notable development is what Visa calls a “strategic collaboration” with OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT, to support payments across OpenAI’s system. “Through the partnership, Visa will provide its global network, credentialing capabilities and security infrastructure to support agentic commerce experiences, helping consumers and businesses interact and transact with confidence,” the payment network said in a news release.
Agentic commerce systems use so-called AI agents to find and compare products and services for shoppers. Ultimately developers hope to bring payments into the process, though that’s the least-developed function so far. But Visa looks to spur such development with its new capabilities, including Agent Score, a service created with AI firm New Generation that enables merchants to evaluate their Web sites for agentic readiness.
Visa also announced a registry of merchants and agents that it has verified as legitimate for agentic commerce. The card network said it is using an AI model trained by evaluating large numbers of transactions to detect fraud while reducing false declines—legitimate transactions rejected because of suspected fraud.
Along with the AI initiatives come enhancements to Visa’s token service, which substitutes card numbers with tokens useless to fraudsters. Visa said it is enriching transaction data carried by tokens “to provide more details on the transaction type, where the token is being used, and who is making the payment.” Another improvement is a so-called token-assurance signal to evaluate a token’s usage through its lifecycle to increase its trustworthiness.
The tokenization developments are linked to new initiatives involving stablecoins , digital currencies tied to fiat money like the dollar and therefore useful for payment transactions. Visa said it is working on tokenized deposits “that can allow banks to turn traditional deposits into programmable, always-on digital money. This gives banks a way to match the speed and flexibility of stablecoins while keeping funds on balance sheet.”
The company is expanding its tests of stablecoins in multiple regions and across various blockchains and stablecoins on its VisaNet network. “Building on its first stablecoin settlement pilots in early 2025, Visa has moved billions of dollars in stablecoins across VisaNet, with an annualized run rate of approximately $7 billion as of March 2026,” Visa said. While issuing banks already settle seven days a week with Visa, the network said it “is also working to extend seven-day settlement to include acquirers, increasing flexibility and frequency across the entire ecosystem.”
Visa said it has 160 stablecoin-linked card programs live or in development that will enable consumers and businesses to spend stablecoin balances anywhere Visa is accepted.
