Visa’s head of tech wants AI companies to focus less on pitch decks and more on code

Rajat Taneja, president of technology at Visa, reminded attendees at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference on Monday that his company was thinking about artificial intelligence before it was cool—since 1991. And in a highly regulated sector, it’s key to cut through the buzz surrounding generative AI.

His advice to emerging AI companies: “Let the code talk for you.”

“Move away from PowerPoint and go to code,” Taneja said.

Fraud detection models in particular have been core to the financial sector’s AI investment, he said. Visa’s suite of AI applications combines an “ensemble” of different models, some open-source, some closed, Taneja said.

“The best companies don’t talk about AI,” added Pegah Ebrahimi of FPV Ventures. She urged companies to think of themselves as service companies solving a real-world problem, rather than as an AI software platform.

Ebrahimi was CIO and COO at Morgan Stanley before she joined FPV. Now, as an investor, she’s advising the AI field to learn from what she noticed during the mobile technology wave. 

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” Ebrahimi said. Uber, for example, is a now ubiquitous product from the shift to mobile apps, she said, noting that few people today think of Uber as just a mobile company—it’s a rideshare service.

And there’s plenty of opportunity for financial services to explore AI investments beyond fraud and cybersecurity, Ebrahimi said. For example, she’s looking at the expectation that baby boomers will transfer $80 trillion in wealth by 2045, while just 1% of Americans say they have a financial advisor.

While trust and security continue to be the bread and butter of AI at Visa, Taneja sees commerce as a next natural step. He believes AI will remove the more banal aspects of consumerism, like reviewing warranties and matching prices, so that humans can focus on the fun parts of shopping.

“Now comes the opportunity to move from the hunt-and-peck era of shopping,” he said.

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