Visa is cutting about 2,600 jobs, roughly 7% of its workforce, in a restructuring CEO Ryan McInerney tied directly to artificial intelligence, according to a staff memo confirmed by the company and reported by CNBC. McInerney wrote that AI “is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa.” The cuts fall mainly on technology and product teams, per the memo.
Visa’s earnings update
For HR leaders, the announcement is another data point in a pattern that started well before this week. Mastercard cut about 4% of its global workforce earlier this year, and Block eliminated nearly 4,000 positions in February. Visa’s move lands the same day the company reported fiscal third-quarter earnings, giving the layoffs a financial backdrop that complicates the AI narrative.
The numbers tell a more complex story than “AI took the jobs.” According to Visa’s fiscal third-quarter earnings materials, net revenue rose 14% year over year to $11.6 billion and GAAP net income climbed 7% to $5.6 billion. Visa said it had about 34,100 employees at the end of fiscal 2025, up about 8% from the prior year, and personnel expenses jumped 40% to $2.5 billion in the quarter, largely reflecting $563 million in severance costs tied to the workforce reduction. A person familiar with the company’s reasoning told CNBC that AI played a significant role in the decision but was not the sole driver, while analysts at Evercore ISI, in a note cited by Reuters, described the move as routine cost and resource reallocation rather than a sign of distress.
Read more: Four big-name AI layoffs, four different explanations
Visa’s investment priorities
A person familiar with the matter told CNBC that Visa plans to reinvest the savings in higher-growth areas, including cross-border, commercial payments, stablecoin infrastructure and other strategic businesses. Cross-border volume was already up 13% in the quarter, and Visa returned $6.2 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends.
Visa’s memo reflects a broader pattern in which companies frame workforce reductions as part of an AI-enabled efficiency push even when business performance remains strong. In Visa’s case, the cuts were concentrated in technology and product roles, and the company said AI was helping reshape how work gets done, but Reuters reported AI was not the sole driver. That seems to suggest that Visa’s layoff announcement is as much about capital allocation and operating model changes as about automation alone.
Read more: Ford’s rehire wave has HR leaders rethinking how AI layoffs get decided
A layoff sequence for ‘human reasons’
David Grossman, CEO of The Grossman Group, a leadership communication consultancy, told HR Executive in an email that “Visa did what most large companies do,” Grossman says. “It disclosed clearly and it disclosed fast. But there is a difference between transparency and dignity, and this memo shows it.”
Grossman says the decision is described as serving Visa, the clients and the partners. “The people losing their jobs are not in that sentence.”
He also notes that there is no acknowledgment of what employees are losing, no thanks for what they built, nothing that names the weight of the day before the memo moves on to momentum and strong results.
The bigger issue, in Grossman’s view, is ownership. “Nobody takes responsibility,” he says.
“The single first-person moment belongs to the CEO expressing conviction that the decision is right. That is confidence, and confidence is not ownership.” Everything after it, he says, gets attributed to something else, such as the need to “continue evolving how we work” or AI “helping to accelerate the evolution.”
Grossman argues employees notice “when nobody says ‘I decided this and here is what it cost.’” He also says that roughly 34,000 people learned that 2,600 jobs were being cut before individual notifications began, a gap he calls the most damaging hour in the process.
“Companies rarely choose that sequence for human reasons,” Grossman says. “Legal and investor timing pushes the announcement ahead of everything else, and the people absorbing it come last.”
His recommendation for HR and communications teams is to brief managers first, equip them for real conversations and let employees hear difficult news from someone who knows them. “Very few companies are willing to do the preparation that requires,” he says.
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