Day 3 - Taking on the challenge of competing: innovation from global markets
Ryan McInerney, CEO of VISA
Moderator: Gabriela Renaudo, First Vice President of IDEA and CEO of Visa Argentina
62° #ColoquioIDEA
September 30, October 1 and 2
Hotel Sheraton - Mar del Plata
What Ryan McInerney said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Ryan McInerney, CEO of Visa, discussed the challenges and opportunities of AI for leaders and companies, emphasizing the need for conviction, courage, and curiosity. He detailed Visa's strategy of providing all employees with access to major AI models like Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Mistral, and highlighted a significant increase in token consumption from 300 million per month a year ago to 9 trillion last month. McInerney described the coming rise of 'agentic commerce' as the third major shift in commerce after e-commerce and mobile, relying on trust and Visa credentials. He expressed strong belief in Argentina's next 20 years, citing Visa's $1.5 billion investment in Prisma and New Bay, and their commitment to helping clients thrive in the country.
Key takeaways
Visa's AI token consumption grew from 300 million monthly to 9 trillion last month, showing massive scaling of AI tool adoption.
Visa invested $1.5 billion in Argentina through acquiring Prisma and New Bay, believing in the country's future.
Visa gave top 300 leaders worldwide a multi-day hands-on AI training session to drive adoption.
0:26The question for you is: in this new era, what are the biggest challenges and opportunities for companies, and how should leaders and teams prepare so they don't fall behind?
3:53So my question is: from Visa's perspective, how is the disruption changing the way business is done?
6:22So I have to ask you: what led Visa to invest in the country, and what do you see next?
It's my pleasure to welcome you at the 62nd EDAS colloquium and thank you very much for being here today. As I shared with you before we started, these days and this year in the colloquium we are talking about Argentina's next 20 years and how Argentina will move from promise to becoming a real economic power. And the conversations these days are about investments, innovations, strong institutions, education, competitiveness, and how Argentina can take advantage of the global change. And as you know, we are in the middle of a profound transformation where artificial intelligence is accelerating change at a pace that is forcing leaders and companies to rethink the business strategy, the business model. So let me start with the big picture. The question for you is: in this new era, what are the biggest challenges and opportunities for companies, and how should leaders and teams prepare so they don't fall behind?
Well, I think these tools present enormous opportunities for all of us as leaders, but as you say, they also present challenges because as leaders we need to decide how to deploy the tools, which tools to deploy, and how to help our teams of employees in our companies put these tools to work to ultimately serve clients, be more efficient, be more effective. And I think as a leader, it requires conviction — conviction that these tools are changing everything about how we lead companies and run companies. It requires courage. It requires the courage as a leader to take big bets, to try to have impact, to really put these tools to work. And it requires curiosity for us as leaders to be willing to say we need to learn, we need to go through training, we need to understand how to put these tools to work in our own lives so that we can demonstrate to our teams the power of them. At Visa, we've gone through that journey. We decided to go all in on making every LLM available to all of our employees around the world. So the average employee at Visa on their Visa laptop has access to Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Mistral, all of the tools that are available. We've given coaching and training to all of our team members, but most importantly, our senior team members. We had the top 300 people about a year ago, including yourself, in a room together from all around the world for a multi-day hands-on keyboard training session with the belief that the unlock came from our senior leaders like Gabby all around the world to then empower the rest of their teams. And as a result, first of all, we've adopted the tools in a much more significant way. A year ago, we were just talking about this. A year ago globally we were consuming about 300 million tokens on a monthly run rate. Last month at Visa we consumed 9 trillion tokens — 9 trillion AI tokens in one month as a company. So we've scaled significantly and we're starting to see the impact by clean-sheet redesigning workflows and processes, agentifying them, and ultimately delivering more effective and more efficient outcomes for our customers that help their businesses. So that's a little bit of how I see both the challenges and the opportunities.
Yes, fully agree. And you know that idea there — sorry — there is representation from financial services, industry, agro, commercial sector, and a lot of expectation about how AI is changing how companies operate. And AI is not only optimizing process productivity but also redefining commerce, and we know about that. So my question is: from Visa's perspective, how is the disruption changing the way business is done?
5 more exchanges in this transcript
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McInerney, R. (2026, October 3). 62° #ColoquioIDEA - Day 3 - Taking on the challenge of competing: innovation from global markets [Interview transcript]. Idea Arg. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2976661/
MLA
Ryan McInerney. "62° #ColoquioIDEA - Day 3 - Taking on the challenge of competing: innovation from global markets." Idea Arg, 3 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2976661/.
BibTeX
@misc{mcinerney2026_2976661,
author = {Ryan McInerney},
title = {62° #ColoquioIDEA - Day 3 - Taking on the challenge of competing: innovation from global markets},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Idea Arg. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2976661/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
