Evident AI Index Payments Roundtable

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Summary

Payments leaders are moving beyond experimentation to embed AI across fraud prevention, developer productivity and the emerging frontier of agentic commerce. The challenge now is not just deploying models, but building the operating systems — talent, governance and platforms — to scale them enterprise-wide.

The inaugural Evident AI Index for Payments roundtable brought together Greg Ulrich (Chief AI and Data Officer at Mastercard), Ryan Prichard (SVP, SMB and Financial Services Engineering at PayPal) and Zachery Anderson (Chief Data and Analytics Officer at J.P. Morgan Payments) to discuss how payments leaders are translating AI investment into measurable business value. The conversation explored use case industrialisation, evolving talent needs and the trust frameworks required to power the next generation of commerce.

Key Discussion Topics

• Building the use case operating system: Mastercard runs a hub-and-spoke model with a single intake process for all AI use cases, reducing duplication and enabling reusable assets across business units. PayPal has democratised AI capability across its diverse portfolio — spanning consumer wallets, merchant services, fraud and checkout — driving density of use cases across domains rather than concentrating them in one central team.
• ROI through risk reduction and software development: J.P. Morgan Payments drives immense ROI by leveraging AI to manage fraud across the 12 trillion in payments it transmits daily. Meanwhile, PayPal realizes significant efficiencies in the software development lifecycle, saving 70 to 80% of time on test code execution while maintaining a 95% yield on finding bugs.
• Talent as a force multiplier: The next critical phase of engineering talent will focus on building, orchestrating, and supervising AI agents. Looking ahead, all panellists pointed to agent orchestration — building, supervising and fine-tuning AI agents — as the defining skill set of the next 1-2 years.
• Trust, governance, and agentic commerce: As the industry explores agentic commerce, trust is non-negotiable. Mastercard approaches strong enterprise guardrails and governance as an accelerator for innovation rather than a roadblock. PayPal extends its 25 years of foundational buyer protection and dispute resolution infrastructure to secure autonomous, agent-initiated transactions.

Key Slides & Perspectives