Visa cuts 2,600 jobs as AI reshapes payments giant's workforce and operations

Visa is cutting 7% of employees in efficiency push as AI reshapes work

Visa, which runs the world's largest payments network, plans to cut about 7% of its workforce as CEO Ryan McInerney moves to streamline the company and invest more in growth areas, according to a memo confirmed by CNBC. The company plans to eliminate roughly 2,600 positions, mostly in its technology and product operations, according to the memo. CNBC confirmed the contents of the memo, which was reported earlier by Bloomberg, with a person with direct knowledge of the matter. "To capture the opportunities ahead and best position Visa to lead this transformation, we must continue evolving how we work," McInerney wrote. "AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa." The layoffs come as companies across the financial and technology sectors increasingly use artificial intelligence to automate technical work like software development, while seeking to rein in costs after years of rapid hiring. Visa had about 34,100 employees at the end of its last fiscal year. While AI played a significant role in the layoffs, it wasn't the sole driver, according to the person with direct knowledge of the matter, who declined to be identified speaking about the changes. Visa wants to invest more in what it views as growth areas, including its emphasis on affluent customers, cross border activity, business payments, stablecoins and geographic expansion, said the person. "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," McInerney wrote, citing good financial results and client satisfaction. Visa is scheduled to report quarterly earnings after the market closes Tuesday.

Payments giant Visa cuts 7pc of its workforce in AI pivot

Layoffs partially a cost-saving measure, sources told Bloomberg. Payments giant Visa is cutting roughly 7pc of its workforce in a now familiar pivot towards AI. The layoffs translate to about 2,600 employees. The job cuts are expected to primarily affect technology and product teams. Visa has European offices in Poland and the UK. "To capture the opportunities ahead and best position Visa to lead this transformation, we must continue evolving how we work," company CEO Ryan McInerney wrote in a memo to staff, parts of which were verified by multiple news organisations. "AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa." Visa's layoffs come at a transformational moment for the tech industry, which has been rapidly evolving since generative AI's mainstream popularity skyrocketed in recent years. Tech leaders, including the likes of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Block's Jack Dorsey, among several others, have shared their vision for slimmer teams powered with AI for better cost saving and added efficiency. Fintech Block cut around 40pc of its company's staff - or around 4,000 people - earlier this year. More recently, Microsoft announced 4,800 job cuts and the parent company behind the Reuters news agency laid off 500 engineering jobs. Even bigger layoffs, including 8,000 job cuts at Meta, were also announced in recent months. According to technology and start-up layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi, 252 tech companies have cut more than 124,000 jobs so far in this year alone, already crossing the nearly 123,000 that were laid off in the whole of 2025. Sources, however, told Bloomberg that AI-powered work efficiency was not the only reason behind Visa's decision to cut jobs. Visa intends to redirect the funds saved towards consumer payments, business and value-added services, including stablecoins, cross-border and business-to-business offerings, they added. "I have deep conviction that we are doing what is right for Visa, our clients and our partners as we continue to focus on driving efficiency across the company in order to reinvest in our highest potential opportunities. "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," McInerney said in the memo. "We see this in our continued strong financial results, client satisfaction, employee engagement, and breakthrough innovation as we build and ship products better and faster than ever before." Net revenue at the company is up 14pc this quarter past to $11.6bn. Company shares gained more than 1pc by trading close on Tuesday (28 July), falling marginally in after-hours trading. Share prices have risen nearly 5pc over the past year. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news. Ryan McInerny at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, 2025. Image: World Economic Forum via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Visa CEO's message to staffers - AI is coming for seven percent of you, but we're sure it's for the best!

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. Future of work 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. Deliverables 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. Growth patterns 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. My take 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.

Visa layoffs: Thousands of jobs slashed at the payments giant as CEO memo points toward AI acceleration

Visa Inc. is preparing to lay off about 2,600 workers, or about 7% of its workforce, the payments processing giant confirmed with Fast Company. The cuts come as the company faces an ever-changing payments landscape, increasingly disrupted by smaller, nimbler fintech startups, and as it focuses more on AI-driven efficiency gains. Here's what you need to know. What's happened? On Tuesday, media outlets including Bloomberg reported that Visa is getting ready to lay off about 2,600 workers. That represents about 7% of the company's roughly 34,000-strong workforce. The cuts were first disclosed to Visa's employees via a memo from CEO Ryan McInerney. Visa confirmed the layoffs and the accuracy of the memo's excerpts to Fast Company.

AI claims thousands of jobs at Visa

Plenty of companies blame artificial intelligence for their recent layoffs, but whether they're being truthful about their motivations is up for debate. U.S.-based employers revealed more than 97,000 job cuts in May, a 16% increase from the more than 83,000 they cut the month prior and 3% higher than last year's total, according to data from Challenger, Gray, & Christmas viewed by TheStreet. The May 2026 total was the highest for the month since 2020, when the Covid pandemic forced employers to cut nearly 400,000 positions. The firm says it has seen "a jump in bankruptcy-related losses, which tells me companies are restructuring aggressively as they reposition for an AI-driven economy," according to Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray, & Christmas. The tech sector was responsible for more than a third of those job cuts, and the 123,653 jobs it cut through the first five months represented a 66% increase year over year. "The labor market is being reshaped by technology in real time. AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs, and the primary industry citing it is Technology. Technology, already the year's biggest job cutter, saw its steepest month of cuts since early 2023, even as it remains the sector with the most hiring plans this year," said Challenger. "AI isn't yet the jobpocalypse some predicted. Like spreadsheets and email before it, the technology will ultimately make workers more productive, but our data shows companies are already acting on it, citing AI for more cuts than any other reason. The open question isn't whether AI changes the workforce, but how fast." This week, payments network operator Visa became the latest corporation to cut thousands of jobs while blaming AI for the changes. Visa cuts 2,600 jobs, cites AI as the reason Visa has plans to cut about 7% of its more than 34,000 global employees, according to a memo viewed by CNBC and Bloomberg. That means Visa is about to eliminate about 2,600 positions, mostly in its technology and product operations. The affected workers were contacted beginning Tuesday, July 28, regarding next steps and transition assistance, a source told CNBC. More AI news "To capture the opportunities ahead and best position Visa to lead this transformation, we must continue evolving how we work," Visa CEO Ryan McInerney wrote. "AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa." But AI wasn't the only factor leading to the layoffs, according to CNBC's source. The company wants to invest in growth areas, including affluent customers, cross-border activity, business payments, stablecoins, and geographic expansion. Visa shares were trading 1.7% higher on July 28, ahead of the company's earnings release after the closing bell. 2Ban / Getty Images Employers blame AI for job cuts Sometimes employers blame one reason for layoffs when other causes may be more pressing. But regardless of whether they are being completely truthful, most are blaming AI for job cuts. AI led all reasons for job cuts in Challenger's data for the third consecutive month, but the 38,579 AI-related job cuts in May were the highest monthly total ever recorded for the reason since the firm began tracking it in 2023. AI accounted for 40% of all job cuts announced in May, up from just 7% in January, 25% in March, and 26% in April. So far in 2026, employers have cited AI in 87,714 job cuts, or 22% of total job cuts. That total is already well ahead of the 54,836 that were attributed to the reason all last year. But it's not all doom and gloom, especially in the tech sector. While May's job cuts were deepest in tech, the industry also led all others in hires. Technology led May hiring by a large margin with 11,250 announced positions. Electronics was the next-largest hirer, adding just 3,158 jobs. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published July 28, 2026 at 7:17 PM.

Visa Lays Off 7% of Workforce to Invest More in AI

Visa is cutting around 7% of its workforce as it shifts more resources toward artificial intelligence, changing the type of engineering talent it wants to hire. Visa has announced that it will cut around 7% of its global workforce as part of a major business change. Reports indicate that the digital payments leader will eliminate around 2,600 jobs globally, bringing it into the limelight. Generally, the administrative, marketing, or support functions, but Visa's layoffs will trim people from its core technology and product divisions. The employees most affected will be software engineers, platform architects, and digital product teams who build and maintain the company's core services. The company is not only trying to reduce costs, but it is also moving money from traditional software projects to AI development. In a memo, the CEO Ryan McInerney has noted that AI is helping to speed up this change and how work is done at Visa. As AI tools become better at writing, testing, and reviewing code, companies no longer need as many people for routine coding work. Instead, they are looking for engineers who can build and manage AI-based systems.