From agentic commerce to its partnership with OpenAI, payments giant Visa is going full bore with its AI initiatives.  

With AI agents as assistants, Visa is reorganizing its product development teams that “used to be 10 or more [people] into smaller and more nimble agentic squads of two to fourand the results are meaningful for those teams that are using the agentic toolchain,” Chief Executive Ryan McInerney said during the company’s fiscal third-quarter earnings call on July 28.  

These agentic squads are leading to “80% more code commits and 80%-plus improvement in requirement definition from 30 days to five days, which has translated to 65%-plus faster feature development,” McInerney said. 

“As a result of this new way of working, we are able to design, build and ship products at an increased velocity with continuous innovation and improvement.”  

The product development efficiencies also translate to customer-facing AI initiatives, including agentic commerce tools, McInerney said. 

AI agents already are shopping on behalf of customers and Visa is eyeing the next phase, with agents completing card transactions without human intervention, he said. 

“The ultimate thing that’s going to accelerate that adoption is going to be trust — trust that the payment is secure, trust that the agent is authorized, trust that reflects the consumer’s actual intent and then the protections exist if something goes wrong,” he said. 

The company is eliminating roles, primarily in its product development department because of agentic AI capabilities, McInerney said. 

Visa announced this week plans to reduce its workforce by roughly 7%.  

AI partners 

Visa is building an infrastructure that will ensure that its “agent-initiated transactions are transparent and trusted across payments,” McInerney said, highlighting Visa’s partnership with OpenAI on agentic commerce.  

“Through the partnership, Visa will provide its credentialing capabilities and security infrastructure to support agentic commerce experiences, helping consumers and businesses interact and transact with confidence,” he said.  

The company’s agentic AI initiatives also are poised to benefit from its partnership with Meta, allowing consumers across Facebook and Instagram “to transact seamlessly and securely with Visa tokens,” McInerney said. 

“All of this progress across stablecoin and agentic demonstrates that we have fundamentally shifted the ‘what’ and ‘how’ in our product development lifecycle,” he said. 

BY THE NUMBERS: In its fiscal Q3 ending June 30, Visa reported:

• Net revenue totaling $11.6 billion, up 14% year over year;
• Payments volume increased 10% YoY; and
• Total transactions processed jumped 10% YoY. 

 Shares of Visa [NYSE: V] were up 0.6% from market open to $368.73 as of market close today. It has a market capitalization of $694.7 billion. 

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