Innovation. Payments. AI. R&D.

A .300 batting average means failing 7 out of 10 times, and yet it gets you into the Hall of Fame. After five years coaching youth baseball, I've come to see that the game's hardest lesson, learning to fail well, is exactly the one organizations need as they test and learn their way through AI. Here's what the batter's box can teach us about taking smart swings, learning fast, and staying in the lineup.

In Synchrony's latest "In Sync with Consumers" research, 56% of consumers told us they interacted with generative AI during the 2025 holiday shopping season, and the top use case across every generation was product discovery.

That’s a signal: AI is moving from “helpful” to "habit", and the next shift is agentic commerce. I wrote more about what we’re seeing in the data and what it means for retailers & payments as the journey gets re-shaped by AI.

Innovation doesn’t move in straight lines...it loops. And if we pay attention, those loops don’t pull us backward, they point us toward what's next. This holiday season, with a Wii and a Tin Can landline phone atop my kids' wish lists, I was reminded that progress doesn't always look like acceleration.