Visa’s massive token usage

Visa is using nearly 2 trillion artificial intelligence tokens a month as it expands internal tools and pushes employees to build faster. (businessinsider.com) Business Insider reported on April 10 that Visa’s monthly token use reached about 1.9 trillion in March, up from roughly 1 trillion in February. Rajat Taneja, Visa’s president of technology, said the company is rewarding teams that use artificial intelligence to get work done faster. (businessinsider.com) A token is a unit of text that an artificial intelligence model reads or writes, so higher token counts usually mean more prompts, more answers, or larger workloads. Companies track tokens because they map closely to usage and cost when employees rely on large language models for coding, analysis, and internal tools. (businessinsider.com) Visa is not a small software startup testing chatbots on the side. In fiscal 2025, the company processed 257.5 billion transactions on its networks, handled $16.7 trillion in total volume, and had 4.9 billion payment credentials in circulation. (s29.q4cdn.com) That scale helps explain why Visa’s internal artificial intelligence push is drawing attention in finance. Taneja oversees the company’s technology strategy, product engineering, global information technology, and operations infrastructure, which puts the artificial intelligence buildout inside the part of Visa that runs its core systems. (investor.visa.com) Visa has been laying groundwork for years. In September 2023, Taneja wrote that Visa had spent three decades using artificial intelligence in payments and fraud work, while generative artificial intelligence opened a new phase for the company. (corporate.visa.com) By late 2025, Visa said artificial intelligence had spread across the business, with employees using it for tasks including data analysis and software development. Fortune reported in October 2025 that Visa had built more than 100 internal artificial intelligence applications and had more than 2,500 engineers working specifically on artificial intelligence. (fortune.com) Visa has also started shipping customer-facing artificial intelligence products, not just internal ones. CNBC reported on April 1 that the company launched new tools for charge-dispute management as banks and financial firms broaden their own artificial intelligence rollouts. (cnbc.com) The token total does not mean Visa is trying to win a vanity contest on raw model usage. Taneja told Business Insider the company is focused on measurable results, even as the numbers show how quickly large employers outside Silicon Valley are turning artificial intelligence into a standard part of daily work. (businessinsider.com)