I’m in the middle of the noisy and hectic show floor at Money 20/20, the big annual financial industry conference that came to Las Vegas this week, and listening to a demo about AI-powered customizable dashboards for internal treasury operations. Yes, I know – it’s a payments nerd’s paradise. 

Lisandra Gonzalez, who leads web and mobile teams at software developer Altimetrik, walks me through the demo on the big screen in front of us at her company’s booth. Altimetrik created a copilot chatbot that allows treasury and finance teams to create their own dashboards from scratch by just texting with the bot. Want to see customer receivables, total cash positions, or perhaps a chart of both? Maybe you want to turn this information into a report and email it to your boss. The chatbot can handle all of it for you. 

“It’s all about not handing off to AI but to make us more efficient,” she explains. 

That demo was representative of AI’s dominance at the show this year, with artificial intelligence popping up at nearly every panel discussion, booth presentation and impromptu meeting at The Venetian expo center. Tech providers and financial players were all looking to show off what they could do with AI, pointing to a future in which chatbots and AI-powered services would be woven into every consumer experience and business function across the entire industry. And it all seems to be happening at record speed. 

“It feels like it’s permeating every conversation, agentic commerce is everywhere ... it’s sort of the number one, two and three point of the conversation,” Greg Ulrich, Mastercard’s chief AI and data officer, says, noting that Mastercard’s customers are asking him about how the payment network is getting value from AI and moving the technology beyond pilot projects. “They want to be ready for the future.” 

Agentic commerce, by the way, is a new concept that’s quickly taking e-commerce by storm, with retail and payments tools being integrated into generative AI chatbot like ChatGPT, so you can find and buy new items or book a vacation right in the chat. 

On the main Exchange Stage, Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, is asked the inevitable question on whether we’re currently in an AI bubble. “For sure [it’s an] unprecedented bubble of dealmaking and some startups won’t make it,” he responds He adds that companies need to ensure they are using AI to drive revenue-making operations and meeting customers where they are, not only focusing on using AI to create efficiencies – otherwise, the investments in these tools won’t add up. 

“The math has to math,” he adds. 

Right by the Mastercard booth, I bump into Eduardo and Diego Pierdant, brothers who were gearing up to launch a new fintech called Monei.us, which is targeted at providing financial tools and advice for the U.S. Latino community. They, too, are looking at ways to integrate AI into their services, including automating payments and sharing financial tips. “Some of it is just hype,” Diego notes, but both agree that the financial industry is quickly moving in this direction. “Everything is going to be completely automated by AI,” Eduardo says.

This mix of an all-consuming AI conversation, the over-the-top nature of Las Vegas and the congregation of fintech fanatics makes for a heady concoction, with sights from the show including panels on “agentic fincrime compliance” and cross-border payment “coopetition,” references to AI smattered across the show floor and, for good measure, a DeLorean parked at one booth in front of a sign saying “Chargeback to the Future.”

While AI is the main attraction this year, blockchain and cryptocurrencies also have a prominent place at the show. 

Luke Tuttle, chief product and technology officer at MoneyGram, says he’s seen a continued maturity in crypto. “We’ve gotten beyond the pilots and gotten into the real use of it,” he says in a stage interview. He adds that the Trump administration’s support of the crypto industry and the recent passage of the GENIUS Act have sparked even more development in the space. 

Michael Saylor, one of the biggest names in crypto, makes an appearance at the Exchange Stage to support that view, saying more major banks and investment advisors are engaging in crypto. “No force on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come,” adds Saylor, the executive chairman of Strategy, a publicly traded company that’s become one of the biggest holders of bitcoin.  

He notes that the industry still needs to “fight against the prejudice against crypto,” saying there’s work to be done to persuade banks, credit rating agencies, regulators and money managers about the value of these digital assets.

Ronak Daya, head of product at blockchain infrastructure company Paxos, walks with me across the show floor as we discussed the potential for crypto to bring its capabilities to AI, smashing together two big buzzwords. “If agentic commerce is going to take off, it’s going to need guardrails and rails to be able to operate those transactions, and crypto provides a very clear answer to that,” he says. He adds that the crypto industry is starting to experiment with how it could use blockchain technologies to eventually verify agentic bots and transactions. 

Discussions on new ways to pay and new capabilities for cards and digital wallets are also a big theme at Money 20/20.

Jennifer Bailey, who leads Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, is interviewed onstage at the first-ever Money Awards, bringing some awards-show glitz to the conference. She says her company is looking to expand its digital wallet into more areas, including house keys, hotel keys, car keys and college dorm room access. Plus, she says Apple is working on adding more identification, like your passport, into its wallet. “Identity will be a long-term journey for us,” she says, noting that people should expect to see more focus from Apple in this area going forward. 

With more information and payments going digital, it will be vital to protect all that data, so security was also an important element of the show. To that end, Mastercard made a splash at Money 20/20 by announcing Mastercard Threat Intelligence, a new cybersecurity collaboration with recent acquisition Recorded Future that can disrupt fraud before it proliferates.

During a panel discussion about creating seamless checkout and payment experiences, Sarah Stapp, chief commercial officer at Aeropay, says the new standard needs to be something she describes as “couch payments.” “If I can’t make a payment from my couch, it’s not good enough,” she says. 

On the same panel, Seema Chibber, who manages Mastercard payments products in North America, says her company focuses on building frictionless payment experiences that are based on principles of consumer privacy, trust and transparency. She says those principles and shared tech standards such as tokenization will be needed to make agentic commerce work.

Asked what new payment experiences might become popular five years from now, she says: “It’s hard to predict what device but the principles stay the same.”