The Agents Economy Backbone - with Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
Protocol vs. Product: Why ACP Is Open
Emily explains choosing an open protocol to enable many agents and PSPs to interoperate and avoid single-vendor lock-in.
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
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?
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