Artificial Intelligence

For the past 25 years, Visa has been pioneering the use of artificial intelligence. Yet not enough people realise it. 

Something else they don’t realise? Right now, Visa’s AI is helping millions of people’s payments go through quickly and securely. 

And one more thing? Visa’s customers are actually helping AI get smarter every second.

So how is that possible?

Visa asked us to create a fascinating, understandable explainer that answered exactly that question. 

We needed to understand exactly how Visa’s AI worked, make it simple enough to understand, and visual enough to be compelling.

We wrote a script that was smart yet understandable, detailed but not dense, fun but not fluffy. 

This explainer would reveal how every transaction you make with a Visa card  – no matter what it is – helps AI get smarter at assessing whether a transaction is at risk of being fraudulent. 

We wrote it to appeal to anyone visiting Visa.com: the media, merchants or interested customers.

How could we show people how Visa’s AI is constantly learning and making decisions with every new transaction? 

The solution was to give physical shape to concepts like ‘transactions’, which became diamonds, squares, circles and crosses. 

Once we’d created this visual vocabulary, we could start to speak with it. We could show AI using these transactions to learn. 

We could also now show AI’s ‘brain’ growing and learning, as it processes and absorbs new shapes, evolving from simplicity to sophistication.

Our story transitions between two worlds: the real-world actions of the cardholder (buying a burrito, for example) and the conceptual world of the AI (checking for potential fraud).

To help us make these transitions seamless, we used ‘frame-within-frame’ storytelling that enabled us to show both worlds at the same time.

Colour was an important storytelling element, too. For example, whenever fraud was committed, we used red followed by a dark screen to represent negative situations.

Wherever we could, we used subtle animations to bring the characters and scenes to life. 

The script and animation worked hand in hand, helping each other to tell the same story as clearly as possible.

Visa’s AI explainer has now been viewed thousands of times online, and also makes appearances at Visa events, Visa innovation centres, trade shows and presentations.