AI Agents Have Brains, But Where Are Their Wallets?

12/10/24 • 47 min

Infinite Curiosity Pod with Prateek Joshi

Amias Gerety is a partner at QED Investors, a fintech-focused VC firm with $3.8 Billion under management. He was previously the Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Treasury. And he graduated from Harvard.
Amias's favorite book: The Origin of Species (Author: Charles Darwin)
(00:01) Introduction and Setting the Stage
(00:29) The Status Quo: AI Agents and Online Purchases
(02:20) The Current Payment Infrastructure Explained
(04:42) Automation Today: Auto-Complete and Recurring Payments
(06:09) Why AI Agents Need Dedicated Financial Infrastructure
(08:29) Historical Examples: Auctions, Bots, and Payment Systems
(09:32) Identifying and Verifying AI Agents in Commerce
(11:59) Risks of Agentic Commerce: Lessons from Knight Capital
(14:47) Stripe’s Role in Agent Payments: SDKs and Gaps
(19:46) Opportunities for Startups in Agentic Frameworks
(22:49) Challenges: Disputes, Chargebacks, and Reversals
(26:32) Regulation and Governance in Agentic Payments
(28:24) Building Merchant Trust in AI Transactions
(30:11) Needs of AI Developers: Reliability in Transactions
(33:04) The Future of Agentic Commerce and Microtransactions
(35:42) Building Consumer Trust in Agentic Systems
(38:45) Broader AI Applications in Finance
(40:13) Rapid Fire
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Where to find Amias Gerety:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amias-gerety/
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Where to find Prateek Joshi:
Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com
Website: https://prateekj.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi

Previous Episode

Decoding Metadata in AI

Cody Coleman is the cofounder and CEO of Coactive AI, a multimodal AI platform to accelerate metadata generation. They recently raised their $30M Series B co-led by Cherryrock Capital and Emerson Collective along with participation from Greycroft, Andreessen Horowitz, and Bessemer Venture Partners. He has a masters degree from MIT and a PhD from Stanford.
Cody's favorite books:
- The Inner Game of Tennis (Author: W. Timonthy Gallwey)
- Gettine More (Author: Stuart Diamond)
(00:01) Introduction: Setting the Stage for Metadata
(00:21) What is Metadata? Structure in Unstructured Data
(01:37) Metadata in Real-World Visual Data Analysis
(03:01) Automating Metadata Generation: Challenges and Approaches
(06:57) Introduction to Multimodal AI: What and Why
(11:25) Managing Trade-Offs in Multimodal AI Systems
(13:31) Labeling Challenges in Multimodal Datasets
(16:23) Characteristics of an Ideal Metadata Language
(18:22) Linking Metadata Quality to Model Effectiveness
(20:56) Measuring Efficiency of Metadata Extraction Engines
(22:55) Role of Synthetic Data in Metadata and AI
(25:30) Evolution of Data Labeling and Future of Metadata
(27:27) Exciting Technological Advancements in AI
(29:29) Rapid Fire Round
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Where to find Prateek Joshi:
Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com
Website: https://prateekj.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi

Next Episode

Building MotherDuck to a $400M Company

Jordan Tigani is the cofounder and CEO of MotherDuck, a data warehouse platform based on open source database DuckDB. They've raised $100M in funding from amazing investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis, Madrona, and Altimeter. He was previously the CPO at SingleStore and spent 11 years at Google before that. He has a degree in electrical engineering from Harvard.
Jordan's favorite book: The Master and Margarita (Author: Mikhail Bulgakov)
(00:01) Introduction
(00:08) Founding of MotherDuck
(01:12) The Philosophy of Shipping Products at MotherDuck
(05:02) Founding Story and Identifying the Market Opportunity
(10:57) Building the First Version and Overcoming Early Challenges
(12:23) Validating Customer Needs and Asking the Right Questions
(18:24) Deciding What Features to Prioritize and Exclude
(21:30) Positioning a New Product in a Mature Market
(27:36) Overcoming Challenges in Scaling MotherDuck
(32:29) Measuring Success of New Features in Enterprise Products
(36:20) Structuring the Organization for Effective Execution
(41:09) Preparing MotherDuck for the AI Native Era
(43:28) Rapid Fire Round
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Where to find Jordan Tigani:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordantigani/
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Where to find Prateek Joshi:
Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com
Website: https://prateekj.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi

Infinite Curiosity Pod with Prateek Joshi - AI Agents Have Brains, But Where Are Their Wallets?

Transcript

Prateek Joshi (00:01.376)
Amias, thank you so much for joining me today.
Amias Gerety (00:04.354)
Thanks for having me. This is fun.
Prateek Joshi (00:06.668)
Yeah, this is a topic we have written about, we've discussed offline. So I'm really excited to dive deeper. So let's paint a picture of status quo for listeners who may not have read the piece. So what happens today when an AI agent tries to make a purchase online? Can you just walk through the current infra that is availa