The Agents Economy Backbone - with Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe

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Oct 30, 2025

Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe, discusses how the company leverages AI to revolutionize financial infrastructure. She dives into Stripe’s innovative fraud detection methods, boosting detection rates from 59% to 97% through real-time model embeddings. Emily explains the launch of the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI, enabling AI-driven commerce for companies like Walmart. She also touches on the importance of diverse billing models, new fraud vectors AI faces, and how creativity will shape the future of commerce in an AI-driven world.

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00:00 / 00:00

Payments Data As Strategic Infrastructure

Stripe leverages payments data at internet scale (~$1.4T/year) to improve products and economic understanding.
That data powers fraud prevention, checkout optimization, and product improvements across merchants.

00:00 / 00:00

Embeddings Power Real-Time Charge Decisions

Stripe built a domain-specific foundation model and dense payment embeddings for many downstream uses.
Those embeddings run inline on the charge path to detect complex patterns like card testing in real time.

00:00 / 00:00

Fast Wins With Foundation Models

After deploying FM embeddings, detection rates for card testing rose for large users from ~59% to ~97% and deployment was fast.
AI companies could quickly label suspicious clusters and decide which batches to block within days.

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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
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?