Visa announced today that it plans to speculate $100 million in firms developing generative AI technologies and applications “that can impact the longer term of commerce and payments.”

The investments can be made through Visa Ventures, the cardboard giant’s 16-year-old global corporate investment arm. 

Visa claims to have been a “pioneer of AI use in payments” since 1993. For the unacquainted, generative AI is an emerging subset of AI trained on large sets of existing data to generate text, images or other content when given text prompts. 

“While much of generative AI thus far has been focused on tasks and content creation, this technology will soon not only reshape how we live and work, but it is going to also meaningfully change commerce in ways we’d like to know,” said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer of Visa, in a written statement.

David Rolf, head of Visa Ventures, said that generative AI has the potential “to be one of the transformative technologies of our time.”

Via email, he told TechCrunch that Visa Ventures “had lots of flexibility” on the subject of what number of investments it will make out of the brand new fund, and average check size.

“Given the early stage of the industry we’d expect to make a variety of smaller investments of a couple of $M,” Rolf said. “That said, we’ve the power to make larger investments where there may be a robust rationale to accomplish that.”

As for criteria, he said that Visa particularly is trying to back firms which might be “applying GenAI to resolve real problems in commerce, payments, and fintech.”

“This includes B2B processes around payments in addition to infrastructure that may have a profound impact on commerce. We’re concerned with firms at multiple levels of the stack, from data organization for GenAI as much as the experiences that users may have at work or of their personal lives,” Rolf added. “Visa could be a impactful enabler of firms solving the following set of challenges to further unlock commerce and this can be a way for us to attach with those startups. One among our key considerations is how well these firms are practicing responsible use of AI, in keeping with Visa’s policies.”

In August, TechCrunch talked with Marie-Elise Droga, who was appointed Visa’s latest head of fintech late last 12 months. On the time, she noted that her team “often collaborates” with the Visa Ventures team — serving as form of a scout engine for Visa’s enterprise arm.

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