Think tap to pay — but smarter and safer. Visa is tapping into AI to enhance services for its global network of customers, focused on fraud prevention, personalization and agentic commerce.
Sarah Laszlo, senior director of Visa’s machine learning platform, recently joined the AI Podcast to discuss how artificial intelligence is powering the next generation of payment experiences.
Visa processes hundreds of billions of transactions each year, so even small technological enhancements can have a large impact.
The company prevents $40 billion in fraud annually. “There’s so much attempted fraud that, even though we’re very good at preventing it, marginal improvements save large dollar amounts,” Laszlo said.
AI also powers Visa’s personalization systems, delivering smarter, more relevant offers and recommendations to cardholders. The company’s unique dataset presents a huge opportunity to improve transaction predictions — but also brings privacy challenges.
“The key to addressing those challenges is building abstract representations of users — embeddings that capture preferences without exposing private data,” Laszlo said.
The company is also working toward agentic commerce — where AI agents help customers with payments. For example, AI agents with access to payment credentials can handle transactions on behalf of consumers, like booking travel arrangements, when instructed.
Laszlo also shared best practices for enterprises adopting generative AI. She recommended using open-source models when possible and developing strong relationships between governance and technical teams. In one success story, Visa used GPT-4 to convert legacy code to Python, saving $5 million, with just one engineer completing 50 conversion jobs in a quarter.
To learn more, you can watch Laszlo’s GTC session, The Next Era of Payments: How Generative AI is Shaping the Future.
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