The Arms Race with Criminals

While most of the world is still running GenAI pilots, Mastercard is running AI inference on 160 billion transactions a year—with a hard latency limit of 50 milliseconds per score.

In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, Johan Gerber (EVP of Security Solutions) and Chris Merz (SVP of Data Science) open the hood on one of the world's largest production AI systems: Decision Intelligence Pro. They reveal how they moved beyond legacy rules engines to build Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) that act as "inverse recommenders"—predicting legitimate behavior faster than the blink of an eye.

AI Gets Real Here. This isn't just about defense. Johan and Chris detail how they are taking the fight to criminals by leveraging Generative AI to engage scammers with "honeypots," expose mule accounts, and map fraud networks globally.

In this episode, we cover:

• The 50ms Inference Challenge: How Mastercard optimized their RNNs to score transactions at a peak rate of 70,000 per second.

• "Scamming the Scammers": How GenAI agents are being used to automate honeypot conversations and extract mule account data.

• The "Inverse Recommender" Architecture: Why Mastercard treats fraud detection as a recommendation problem (predicting the next likely merchant).

• Org Design for Scale: The "Data Science Engineering Requirements Document" (DSERD) Chris used to align four separate engineering teams.

• The Hybrid Infrastructure: Why moving to Databricks and the cloud was necessary to cut innovation cycles from months to hours.

🚀 CHAPTERS

00:00 - Intro: 160 Billion Transactions & 50ms Decisions

02:08 - Thinking Like a Criminal: Johan’s Law Enforcement Background

06:22 - Org Design: Why AI is the "Middle Lane" of Engineering

11:00 - The Scale: 70k Transactions Per Second

15:47 - Decision Intelligence Pro: The "Inverse Recommender" RNN

23:00 - The "Lego Block" Strategy: Aligning Data Science & Engineering

33:00 - Infrastructure: Why Cloud/Databricks was Non-Negotiable

37:00 - GenAI Offensive: Threat Hunting & "Scamming the Scammers"

46:40 - "Honeypots" and Detecting Mule Accounts

52:00 - Advice for Technical Leaders: Talent & Prioritization

Presented by Outshift by Cisco Outshift is Cisco’s emerging tech incubation engine and driver of Agentic AI, quantum, and next-gen infrastructure. Learn more at outshift.cisco.com.

About VentureBeat: VentureBeat equips enterprise technology leaders with the clearest, expert guidance on AI – and on the data and security foundations that turn it into working reality.

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