Tech Disruptors

AI agents are rapidly reshaping product discovery and shopping, but earning consumer trust in payments is a critical barrier to fully autonomous commerce. In this episode of Bloomberg Intelligence’s Tech Disruptors podcast, Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, joins BI fintech and payments analyst Diksha Gera to discuss what needs to be solved before agentic commerce can move from product discovery to transactions at scale. They explore how merchants distinguish legitimate agents from bots, how consumers set and verify an agent’s authority to spend, who carries liability when an autonomous transaction goes wrong and whether emerging payment and checkout protocols can work together. The discussion examines why solving identity, intent, control and accountability could determine how quickly AI agents graduate from shopping assistants to economic actors, and how that shift could affect merchant conversion, pricing and loyalty.

“Ultimately it comes down to the simple question of how do you leverage AI to transform and rethink your business in an AI world vs. just applying AI to what you already do today,” Bruce Ross, group head of artificial intelligence at Royal Bank of Canada, tells Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Analysts Paul Gulberg and Anurag Rana. In this episode, the group discusses how RBC’s decade-long investment in proprietary models, data infrastructure and AI talent is translating into measurable returns across credit, software development, fraud prevention and client engagement. Ross explains how intelligent model routing, more than 50,000 internal agents and a growing ability to build capabilities in-house are reshaping RBC’s technology stack while preserving the controls and trust required in banking.

Cornelis Networks is bringing its high-performance computing heritage into AI as larger clusters put growing pressure on the network connecting accelerators. The company, which has its roots in Intel’s former Omni-Path business, is expanding from scale-out into scale-up networking with its Active Compute Fabric. CEO Lisa Spelman joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Woo Jin Ho on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss why bandwidth alone may not solve AI infrastructure bottlenecks, the move from 400G to 800G and 1.6T, how networking can improve token economics, and how Cornelis sees its position evolving alongside Ethernet, InfiniBand and increasingly integrated AI systems.

Just how big a threat is AI to software-as-a-service providers, and what changes will it bring to the broader industry? Silver Lake Managing Partner Joe Osnoss sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mandeep Singh to discuss the “SaaSpocalypse” and the firm’s exposure to AI, data centers and other major technology themes. The conversation also explores how AI is reshaping software business models, competitive positioning and margin profiles of Silver Lake’s portfolio companies. Osnoss shares his perspective on where long-term value may emerge amid a shift in the technology stack.

“The focus of the market and the industry is to make compute infrastructure in its own right a financeable asset class,” says Rich Myers, Morgan Stanley’s global head of structured products and private capital markets. Myers joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Alexandra Davidov and Rob Schiffman on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how capital markets are evolving to fund the AI infrastructure build-out. He explains why a deeper secondary market for GPUs and compute systems could eventually allow investors to underwrite their residual value, rather than relying on today’s largely fully amortizing structures. The conversation also explores how public and private capital are converging, why the constraint on AI financing may be project readiness rather than investor capacity and how new structures are allowing even unrated neoclouds to access investment-grade financing when backed by high-quality customer contracts.