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"Visa Has Deployed Hundreds of AI Use Cases. It’s Not Stopping.
"‘Impatience is a virtue,’ said Visa’s president of technology, Rajat Taneja
By Isabelle Bousquette, The Wall Street Journal, 1 Nov 2024
[Image - Rajat Taneja said Visa doesn’t invest in AI to displace talent. Photo: Vincent Isore / ZUMA Press]
"Visa is leaning on staff to quickly drum up generative AI use cases even as the payments giant streamlines its international business and cuts jobs.
"President of Technology Rajat Taneja said the company already has more than 500 generative artificial intelligence applications in use, the result of a go-fast strategy designed to reap the AI’s benefits sooner and keep pace with bad actors whose fraud methods are becoming more sophisticated.
"“This is a time when I think we have to innovate very fast,” Taneja said.
"At the same time, Visa is contending with a restructuring of its international business. The company plans to lay off around 1,400 employees and contractors by the end of the year, according to people familiar with the matter. Roughly 1,000 are technology positions, they said. Visa said it continuously evolves to better serve clients and support growth, “which can lead to the elimination of some roles.”
"“We don’t invest in AI to displace our talent; we invest in AI to help our employees be more productive, continue to protect consumers from fraud, and to drive consistent innovation in payments,” a spokesman said.
"Visa’s flood-the-zone approach with AI apps comes as the appetite across the board for blind spending on AI has diminished. CEOs and boards are putting more pressure on seeing actual returns—which often are turning out not to be there.
"Thirty-seven percent of organizations surveyed in Gartner’s annual CIO and Technology Executive Survey this year said they are using generative AI in production, up from 9% last year.
"Visa’s deployments include a tool that finds security bugs in code, chatbots designed to act as subject matter experts on various areas of the business and a tool that helps subscribers customize timings of their billing cycles.
"Visa said it has invested $3.3 billion in AI and data infrastructure over the last 10 years.
"Visa’s generative AI approach has pluses and minuses, said Gartner AI analyst Whit Andrews, adding that first movers quickly discover what works and what doesn’t. Those who wait will learn from the mistakes of others and be able to just tackle the projects with the highest probability of success. More than 60% of organizations are still in that second bucket, he said, but it isn’t clear yet which approach will pay more returns in the end.
"Gauging those returns on generative AI work can be a challenge, Taneja said. Apps designed to help catch fraud can show how many dollars of fraud they saved. One new AI tool is aimed at identifying enumeration attacks, which inflict $1.1 billion annually in fraud losses..."...
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