Visa to Invest $100 Million in Generative AI for Commerce and Payments

Visa has launched a new $100 million generative artificial intelligence (AI) ventures initiative, aiming to invest in companies focused on developing generative AI technologies and applications that will shape the future of commerce and payments.

This initiative builds upon Visa’s long-standing use of AI in payments and its commitment to driving innovation in the industry, the global payments company said in a Monday (Oct. 2) press release.

Generative AI, an emerging subset of AI, utilizes large language models (LLMs) to create artificial general intelligence capable of generating text, images, and other content from vast amounts of existing data.

Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said in the release: “While much of generative AI so far has been focused on tasks and content creation, this technology will soon not only reshape how we live and work, but it will also meaningfully change commerce in ways we need to understand.”

Visa’s generative AI ventures initiative will be led by Visa Ventures, the company’s global corporate investment arm, per the release. Since 2007, Visa Ventures has been investing in and partnering with companies driving innovation in payments and commerce.

David Rolf, head of Visa Ventures, said in the release: “With generative AI’s potential to be one of the most transformative technologies of our time, we are excited to expand our focus to invest in some of the most innovative and disruptive venture-backed startups building across generative AI, commerce and payments.”

An emergent generation of AI tools that move beyond siloed automation solutions are ushering in a new era for chief financial officers (CFOs), PYMNTS reported in May. These tools are freeing up employees from less rewarding work and augmenting human-level analytical strengths in ways that ladder-up to key business goals.

In one application of the technology, AI can help harvest data and turn that data into signals that provide actionable intelligence for fraud prevention, Michael Jabbara, vice president and global head of fraud services at Visa, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in September.

AI, Jabbara said, is “he superpower that gives us the ability to detect that proverbial fraudulent needle in the overall haystack of legitimate interactions — and then build the automation necessary to carve out the fraud while letting the authentic transactions go through.”