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
* X: https://x.com/emilygsands
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/egsands/
Where to find Shawn Wang
* X: https://x.com/swyx
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnswyxwang/
Where to find Alessio Fanelli
* X: https://x.com/FanaHOVA
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fanahova/
Where to find Latent Space
* X: https://x.com/latentspacepod
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