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, 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 shared best practices for enterprises adopting generative AI. She also 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, watch Laszlo’s GTC session, The Next Era of Payments: How Generative AI is Shaping the Future.
Time Stamps
03:28 – Visa’s priorities for AI use.
07:09 – How Visa optimizes resources using virtual GPUs.
14:42 – AI factories and unified pipelines.
18:52 – Best practices for AI in financial services.
You Might Also Like…
NVIDIA’s Jacob Liberman on Bringing Agentic AI to Enterprises
Agentic AI enables developers to create intelligent multi-agent systems that reason, act and execute complex tasks with a degree of autonomy. Jacob Liberman, director of product management at NVIDIA, explains how agentic AI bridges the gap between powerful AI models and practical enterprise applications.
Firsthand’s Jon Heller Shares How AI Agents Enhance Consumer Journeys in Retail
Jon Heller, co-CEO and founder of Firsthand, discusses how the company’s Brand Agents are transforming the retail landscape by personalizing customer journeys, converting marketing interactions into valuable research data and enhancing the customer experience with hyper-personalized insights and recommendations.
Telenor Builds Norway’s First AI Factory, Offering Sustainable and Sovereign Data Processing
Telenor opened Norway’s first AI factory in November 2024, enabling organizations to process sensitive data securely on Norwegian soil while prioritizing environmental responsibility. Telenor’s Chief Innovation Officer and Head of the AI Factory Kaaren Hilsen discusses the AI factory’s rapid development, going from concept to reality in under a year.
