Visa has announced a suite of new artificial intelligence (AI), stablecoin, and token capabilities at its Payments Forum 2026 in San Francisco.
In a statement on Thursday, Visa said the new development can help clients navigate the shift toward automated, agent-driven commerce and programmable money movement.
Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa, said AI is transforming the front end of commerce while stablecoins are reshaping the back end. Visa’s role is to enable both to work securely and at global scale, the executive added.
AI and Visa Intelligent Commerce
Visa detailed enhancements to Visa Intelligent Commerce, its platform for agentic commerce, which provides the trust, controls, and connectivity needed for AI agents to securely initiate and complete transactions. New capabilities include an Agent Score tool that evaluates merchant websites for agentic commerce readiness, and an Agentic Directory of verified agents and merchants. Visa also announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI enabling AI agents to initiate Visa payments within defined user permissions.
A Large Transaction Model, trained on billions of transactions, is also being introduced to improve fraud detection while reducing false declines, a longstanding challenge for the payments industry.
Token Enhancements
Visa also announced enhancements to its token infrastructure, adding richer data on transaction type, location, and the identity of the party initiating payment, alongside a token assurance signal that evaluates trust based on provisioning and behavioural history. The enhancements are designed to embed identity and permissions more deeply into credentials, including for transactions initiated autonomously by AI agents.
Stablecoin Settlement
On the back-end, Visa said it will build a technology layer enabling banks to convert traditional deposits into programmable digital money. Visa has moved billions of dollars in stablecoins across VisaNet, with an annualized run rate of approximately $7 billion as of March 2026, and is expanding stablecoin settlement pilots across multiple regions, blockchains, and currencies. More than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs are currently live or in development globally.