How Visa is designing smarter credit cards for AI shopping

For years, predictions about the future of commerce have often ended the same way: Credit cards eventually disappear. Digital wallets would replace them. Cryptocurrencies would replace them. Buy now, pay later services would replace them. More recently, artificial intelligence has been cast as the next disruptor, with AI agents expected to handle everything from product discovery to checkout. If an AI assistant can compare prices, find the best deal, and complete a purchase on your behalf, what role is left for a traditional payment network? Visa thinks the answer is simple: a very big one. At Visa Payments Forum 2026 this week, the company unveiled a slate of new AI, tokenization, and stablecoin initiatives designed to ensure that as AI transforms commerce, Visa cards remain the preferred way to pay. In fact, the company is making a bet that the AI shopping boom could strengthen the role of credit cards, rather than weaken it. AI is helping people shop—but it isn’t buying much yet The vision of AI agents handling purchases for consumers has generated enormous excitement across the technology industry. But Visa says there’s a significant gap between consumers’ using AI to research products and actually allowing AI to spend money. “I was literally in a Visa office overseas, a few months ago, and I asked for a show of hands. Tell me, everybody, if you’ve used AI to help you shop. Every single hand in the room goes up,” Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, tells Fast Company. “Tell me if you’ve used AI to actually check out. No hands go up. And this is a room full of payments nerds.” Forestell said Visa identified the potential for AI-powered shopping more than a year ago as search tools became increasingly conversational and capable of helping consumers reach decisions faster. “We really got focused on this whole notion of agentic commerce, or AI-assisted commerce, more than a year