Transforming Payment Technology with AI

Stripe Payments is a Business Reporter client

Global payments processor Stripe explores how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing business payments by increasing revenue, reducing fraud and transforming the customer experience.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in payments technology is now an essential operational tool to solve some of the most expensive and complex problems in the business payments lifecycle. Organizations that fail to take advantage of this are leaving significant revenue on the table, while also failing to optimize their financial security.

AI is also quietly reshaping the way money moves: how transactions are approved, how fraud is detected and how disputes are managed. Work that once required teams of highly paid analysts and long lists of rigid rules can now be handled by intelligent systems that learn, predict, and adapt in real time.

For businesses, especially those operating across borders, this change offers something rare: the chance to increase revenues, reduce costs, address fraud and improve the customer experience all at the same time.

problem with payment

Most business leaders are well aware that unnecessary friction at checkout causes many users to abandon their shopping carts. What is less known is how many other invisible costs of fraud and failed authorizations are hidden in the payments process.

Payment fraud is one of the most significant financial risks in digital commerce. In addition to direct financial losses for lost merchandise, businesses face substantial chargeback fees. 55 billion dollars annuallyIn addition to the administrative burden of managing disputes.

The challenge is that cheaters are adaptable. Stable, rule-based fraud systems create a constant cat-and-mouse game. Retailers update rules to catch one scam while another slips up elsewhere. Worse, overly aggressive filters often block legitimate transactions, generating “false positives” that alienate genuine customers and harm lifetime value.

Another problem point is failed payments. This is a revenue killer that many businesses fail to address, often because they simply don’t pay attention to it. But this is of utmost importance: unnecessary decline is projected to reach $265 billion by 2027The cost of both immediate revenue and long-term customer relationships.

The reasons for payment failures vary and can also include customers mistyping their details. With AI-powered systems, authentication decisions can be based on actual transaction risk rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. By analyzing factors such as customer behavior, device information, and transaction details, AI can determine which payments require additional verification and which payments can safely proceed immediately.

Solving payment problems with AI

According to a recent guide to payments from Stripe, AI brings a new level of intelligence and adaptability to payments – not only by detecting patterns in the data but by acting on them in real-time to optimize each transaction.

As well as addressing fraud and payment failures, AI can analyze the unique context of each checkout session: who the customer is, what device they are using, their purchasing history, and what they are purchasing. Using these signals, AI can be used to optimize the checkout flow by avoiding unnecessary options (offering an inappropriate payment method can significantly reduce conversion rates), maintaining persuasive messages and achieving the best balance between security and customer convenience.

This level of personalization has been shown to significantly reduce drop-off. Stripe has trained its payment systems on hundreds of billions of dollars of transactions worldwide, meaning it can improve payment experiences for every customer segment and geography while protecting merchant and customer privacy.

Another problem that AI can address is the cost of chargebacks. As online shopping has increased, so have chargebacks, and increasingly, many of these chargebacks are inappropriate or even fraudulent. AI can help retailers determine whether a chargeback is appropriate; For example, a buyer may simply need to be reminded why a debit has been made. But AI can transform dispute management from a reactive process to a proactive one by identifying risky charges before they become disputes and allowing businesses to intervene early, for example, by issuing refunds for known defective items or flagging suspicious behavior.

AI agents and the future of e-commerce

While AI is already transforming today’s payment systems, the next wave of change will come from AI agents, autonomous systems capable of making purchasing decisions on behalf of users.

Imagine a world where your customer is not the person clicking the Buy Now button, but an AI assistant managing supplies, booking services or subscriptions on behalf of your operator. These transactions will have to be machine-readable, fraud-resistant and instantly verifiable. When that happens, businesses will need checkout and authentication processes that are optimized for both human customers and AI agents. Preparing for this agentic commerce model will result in more cost-efficient payment systems, as well as happier, more loyal customers.

Preparing for the AI ​​Payments Era

The use of AI in payment processes will increase revenues through higher conversion rates and fewer failed transactions. This will also reduce costs, reduce losses from fraud and take less time to manage disputes.

To get started, organizations should:

The opportunity is clear: better payments performance, stronger customer trust and a more intelligent digital commerce ecosystem. Businesses that add intelligence to their payments infrastructure can turn what was once a cost center into a competitive advantage.

To learn how AI is reshaping payments, and how businesses can take advantage of this opportunity, read the full Stripe report: How is AI changing payments?,