Digging into Visa’s AI efforts, it’s easy to see how the company earned the No. 2 spot on the Fortune AIQ 50 list, which benchmarks companies on their AI maturity.
According to Rajat Taneja, Visa’s president of technology, the global payments company has woven AI into every part of its business. Employees across Visa are tapping AI in their everyday workflows for tasks ranging from data analysis to software development. The company has built more than 100 internal AI-powered business applications tailored to specific use cases and has over 2,500 engineers working specifically on AI. Visa is also using AI to create new products and services for its customers, such as faster onboarding, simplified processes for managing disputes, and infrastructure for agentic AI technologies.
“[AI] is part of the fabric of the company,” Taneja said. “In everything we do, we’re using it internally, and we’re using it to create intelligent and smarter, more capable products for our customer base.”
But this didn’t happen overnight, or even in just the past few years. Visa was already hard at work developing AI technologies and strategies when ChatGPT entered the scene and kicked off the corporate rush toward AI adoption. It’s been a decade-long journey, and Taneja believes the approach the company was able to develop over that period—learning how to balance urgency with intention, and treating models as a science and governance as an art—played a big role in getting it this far.
