How Visa Is Making Payments Safer and Smarter with AI - Ep. 256

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. AI's impact on the financial services industry has already been quite significant. From improving customer satisfaction and loyalty to streamlining operations and reducing costs, artificial intelligence is transforming an industry that's already been at the forefront of technology innovation for quite some time now. Visa is leading the way in leveraging AI to transform payment experiences. And with us to talk about how they're doing it is Sarah Laszlo. Sarah is senior director of Visa's machine learning platform, where she's architecting the infrastructure that will power Visa's future. Before joining Visa, Sarah well, her resume is really impressive and too long to get into right now, but I have to mention she was on NPR Science Friday, which is pretty cool. Sarah, welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time to join the AI podcast. Yes. Thank you so much. So before we get into all the stuff you're doing at Visa, all the stuff Visa's doing, would you tell us a little bit about your own journey, maybe how you got started in AI, and how you wound up in the role you're in now? Yeah. So, one thing that I always like to remind people of these days is that, of course, everybody thinks of artificial intelligence as something maybe that computer scientists do, but we need to remember that the back propagation paper that opened the field back up again after sort of the AI winter was, yes, Geoff Hinton was on there, but it was also coauthored by three psychologists, David Rumelhart. And I came up through that tradition of psychology. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So my PhD is in psychology, and I became interested in computational neuroscience. There were many steps along the way Sure. Sure. Dot dot. Yeah. But now I still do it. Very cool. Did you practice as a psychologist? I was not ever a clinical psychologist or therapist. I was a cognitive neuroscientist. Right. So, you know, I worked with human research participants, but never in a therapeutic context. Got you. And so was computational neuroscience kind of your pathway leading to where you are now? Yeah. So, my postdoctoral adviser, David Plaut, was appointed in both psychology and computer science at Carnegie Mellon, and my academic grandfather in that line is Jeff Hinton. So Amazing. Most of the people who who were in that line and now do this. Right. Because that was sort of there were not that many people in 2009 that were doing deep learning. And so if you are one of those, you're one of the only, you know, 20 people that have fifteen years of deep learning experience. Totally. Totally. Incredible. I kind of hinted at it, and we don't want we wanna talk about what you're doing. How did you wind up with this role? Yeah. So I was working in responsible AI at Google, and I did that for …