Emily Glassberg Sands is the Head of Data & AI at Stripe where she leads the organization’s efforts to build financial infrastructure for the internet & leverage AI to power Stripe’s products. Stripe processes about $1.4 trillion in payments annually (~1.3% of global GDP), making it an exciting opportunity to apply AI & ML at scale. In this episode, Emily shares insights into how Stripe is using AI to solve complex problems like fraud detection, optimizing checkout experiences, & enabling new business models for AI companies. Emily also shares her economist perspective on market efficiency & how Stripe’s focus on building economic infrastructure for AI is driving growth across the ecosystem.
We discuss:
- Stripe’s domain-specific foundation model and “payments embeddings” that run inline on the charge path to detect sophisticated card-testing at scale (improved detection rates at large users from ~59% to ~97%).
- The launch of the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) with OpenAI, creating a shared standard for how businesses can expose products to AI agents which is used by Walmart and Sam’s Club.
- How Stripe is helping AI companies manage new fraud vectors, such as free trial and refund abuse, and the importance of real-time, outcome-based billing
- The impact of AI on Stripe’s internal operations, including the use of LLMs for code generation, merchant understanding, and internal tooling
- Why many AI companies are going global day-one how Stripe’s Link network (200M+ consumers) concentrates AI demand.
- Whether we're in an AI bubble, why GDP hasn't reflected AI productivity gains yet, and how agentic commerce could expand consumption by removing time constraints for high-income consumers
- Emily’s perspective on the changing social contract around AI, the importance of deep thinking, and the role of brand and design in AI-driven products
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Where to find Emily Sands
Where to find Shawn Wang
Where to find Alessio Fanelli
Where to find Latent Space
- X: https://x.com/latentspacepod
- Substack: https://www.latent.space/
Chapters
- 00:00:00 Introduction and Emily's Role at Stripe
- 00:09:55 AI Business Models and Fraud Challenges
- 00:13:49 Extending Radar for AI Economy
- 00:16:42 Payment Innovation: Token Billing and Stablecoins
- 00:23:09 Agentic Commerce Protocol Launch
- 00:29:40 Good Bots vs Bad Bots in AI
- 00:40:31 Designing the Agents Commerce Protocol
- 00:49:32 Internal AI Adoption at Stripe
- 01:04:53 Data Discovery and Text-to-SQL Challenges
- 01:21:00 AI Economy Analysis: Bubble or Boom?