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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.
Ask an AI shopping agent for the best way to pay for a refrigerator and the answer may depend on far more than price.
An agent making a recommendation has to understand both the available payment options and the person it represents. Consumers are already using generative AI conversationally to search for products and ask questions such as how they can afford a purchase. A retailer or financial institution may no longer control the first description a consumer sees of its offer.
American Banker LEADERS Series: While many banks have launched AI pilots, the real challenge is scaling AI across the enterprise. That requires modern infrastructure, trusted data, governance frameworks, and new operating models. This discussion will explore how banks are moving beyond experimentation to embed AI into core operations, developer workflows, risk management, and customer platforms—unlocking productivity gains and entirely new capabilities.
Artificial intelligence is crossing an important line inside the enterprise. It is moving from generating answers and assisting employees to executing work, coordinating systems and making decisions within defined boundaries. The agentic enterprise is not a distant vision of machines running companies on their own. It is an operating model taking shape now, one workflow, permission and decision at a time.