AI and Mobile Payments: A Huge Partnership in the Making

While artificial intelligence (AI) is a topic that raises more than a little debate, it’s debate that runs the gamut of possibilities. Wild-eyed futurists offer dreams of a stressless lifestyle managed by machines and equally wild-eyed disaster buffs predict failures from jobless dystopia to full-on Skynet-style apocalypse. The most likely path may be somewhere in the middle, and new reports suggest that AI will have a bigger role in the future of mobile payments than some might foresee.

We’ve already seen what AI can do in some markets, and how this translates readily into future opportunities. We’ve already seen AI deliver big in terms of asking directions, or getting answers to random questions. AI has played a part in our buying and selling as well, even in shipping and fraud prevention.

It’s entirely possible that AI could progress to the point where it does buying and selling itself on behalf of its owner, and uses mobile payments directly as the medium of exchange. AI’s ability to handle large quantities of information and distill that information down to its most basic elements makes it especially good at spotting patterns, like how often you go through a gallon of milk.

In fact, some believe that AI will ultimately be a part of mobile payments platforms; it’s already been seen somewhat with developments like Braintree, PayPal’s fraud-prevention masterwork that can spot the needle of fraud in a haystack of huge numbers of transactions. Incorporating that kind of fraud detection into a mobile payments system might stop at least some frauds before they happen.

Naturally, we have a ways to go before we can just hand over the keys to AI and go take a nap. Human oversight will be required for quite some time to come, if for no other reason than the end user won’t stand for it. “I, Robot” will be ringing in way too many heads for that not to happen.

While there’s a lot of room for supposition and suggestion in here, it’s clear that AI is gaining plenty of ground in mobile payments. What we’ll see five years from now, or even next year, may be unimaginable to us right now. All I know is, I’m looking forward to seeing it.