Visa has become the latest Financial Services organization to slash its work force headcount and cite AI as the reason, with 2,600 jobs - seven percent of the global workforce - to go, mostly from tech and product teams.  According to the company’s last annual report, Visa had about 34,100 employees in fiscal 2025

In a message to employees, CEO Ryan McInerney told staff: 

As a result of the choices we have made over the past few years, we are entering A new era in commerce with a business that has real momentum…To capture the opportunities ahead and best position Visa to lead this transformation, we must continue evolving how we work.  AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa. 

He added: 

AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa.

This was a message that McInerney re-iterated later in an analyst call when he argued: 

With the dawn of the generative AI era, we moved quickly to deploy AI across our enterprise to assist us in areas like engineering, client service and model orchestration. Now as we enter the era of agentic AI, we are going beyond AI assistance and harnessing the power of AI to execute work and tasks with our supervision. We have progressed materially in product development and engineering, deploying new tools, plug-ins, agent skills and persistent sessions to create an end-to-end pipeline with human oversight and autonomous capability.

In terms of  workforce requirements, that means: 

As a result of the unlocks we can realize with this new tooling, we are re-forming our product development teams that used to be 10 or more into smaller and more nimble agentic squads of two to four. And the results are meaningful for those teams that are using the agentic tool chain with 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.  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.

This is delivering results in terms of product offerings, he added, citing stablecoin and agentic commerce as two areas in which this new way of working can be seen in action: 

We have fundamentally shifted the what and how in our product development life cycle. We now have more than 150 AI-powered applications. And over the last 12 months, we have shipped more than 300 major product releases.

He elaborated: 

We are active and investing in each layer of the stablecoin stack from blockchain to issuance, wallets, infrastructure and orchestration and applications…we have made progress in both the issuance and application layers. If stablecoins are reshaping the back end of commerce, we see AI as transforming the front end. We believe agentic commerce will expand our addressable market and drive future growth for Visa. 

Recently the firm has enabled new seller capabilities, such as its Agent Score and Agent Directory, and built out infrastructure, such as its Token Assurance Framework which is pitched as ensuring that agent-initiated transactions are transparent and trusted.

And there’s a lot of partnering going on with AI sector movers and shakers, including the inevitable tie-up with OpenAI which is now compulsory for enterprises across every business sector. This one centers on securing Visa payments within agentic commerce, explained McInerney: 

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.

Meanwhile a deal with Meta will result in new ways to pay across Facebook and Instagram, powered by Visa Intelligent Commerce, allowing consumers to transact seamlessly and securely with Visa tokens.

All of this AI-centered activity and investment is about encouraging growth, he insisted: 

At the highest level, we believe that AI and agentic commerce will expand our addressable market. 

But in an echo of what’s fast become a familiar enterprise message in 2026, he acknowledged that it’s early days here and there’s a major adoption curve ahead: 

To get a sense of like how this progresses from here, it's instructive to look at other kind of major cycles that we've been through, whether it was e-commerce or mobile commerce, tokenization, tap to pay. These innovations and these kind of major forces followed a similar pattern - you have an early period where Visa and other players are establishing standards. [and] we're announcing, launching and shipping new products. Then you migrate into the early adoption period of the curve, which ultimately then leads to growing consumer momentum and ultimately broad scale. 

We don't think agentic commerce will be any different, but we are in the very early stages. You have consumers that are already using AI to shop and then the next phase will be enabling agents to transact on their behalf, whether with or without them in the loop. And that's where we come in. 

And in another familiar refrain, he argued that trust will be the accelerant here: 

Trust that the payment is secure, trust that the agent is authorized, trust that the transaction reflects the consumer's actual intent and then the protections exist if something goes wrong. If you look at the products that we've announced over the last several quarters, they're all directly intended to address that trust and ensure that our users have trust in using Visa credentials to make agentic commerce transactions.

Overall, agentic commerce is definitely a ‘when’ not an ‘if’, he insisted, but added that he isn’t able to state which ‘inning’ the game is in at present: 

I feel really good about the progress that we've made in kind of a post generative AI world. But again, just if you zoom out a bit, like we've had a long history of AI at Visa. We were an early adopter of AI many, many years ago, and then you jump forward to where we are today. We're seeing fantastic results [but] I really don't know how to predict what inning we're in, other than to say we've had very good deployment of the AI tools across the company, especially in product and engineering. We're getting good adoption in other parts of the company.

His conclusion:

 I think we still have enormous opportunity ahead of us there, and we're just going to continue to lean into using these tools to drive efficiency and effectiveness shipping products better, faster and ultimately better serving our clients in the ecosystem.

I have deep conviction that we are doing what is right for Visa.

Good to know from the man making the decisions,  but  cold comfort if you’re one of the Visa staffers about to be made redundant. 

Of course Visa is hardly alone in using AI as an excuse to rationalize its workforce. Earlier this year, rival Mastercard announced it was laying off four percent of its workforce, some 1,400 people, again citing AI as a critical factor in this decision. 

One other thing that Mastercard and Visa have in common - they made their layoff announcements around strong quarterly numbers. Mastercard did its one after posting a quarterly profit of $4.1 billion, with revenue up 18% year-on-year, while Visa just turned in revenues of $11.63 billion, up 14% year-on-year with profit of $6.3 billion, comfortably beating Wall Street expectations. 

Timing is everything…