How will AI shape our future? There’s a big clue tucked in your wallet.

In the three and a half months since it launched, the artificial intelligence chatbot known as ChatGPT has triggered a fair amount of consternation among white-collar workers about their professional future. Those emotions only increased this week after the release of GPT-4 , an even more powerful AI model that can accept image and text inputs.

Trepidation, awe, bewilderment – all of these are natural reactions to a technology that effortlessly generates essays, articles, letters, software code and many other outputs that can take human workers hours if not days to create.

How to make sense of this brave new world? Let me suggest there’s an answer hiding in your wallet.

In the early 1990s, I led the team that built an AI-based product called Falcon for credit-card fraud detection. If you’ve ever gotten a message from your financial institution that says, “Hi, we’ve noticed some unusual transactions on your credit card. Could you please contact us?” that was our AI engine with a neural network running in the bank’s authorization system.

We patented Falcon in 1992, launched the product, and it became a huge success. Within three years, 23 of the top 25 U.S. banks were running Falcon. Eventually Falcon was sold to the credit-scoring company FICO, which has made it a cornerstone of its platform to help banks distinguish legitimate transactions from criminal ones. Today, Falcon is running on over 3 billion payment accounts worldwide , and it’s estimated that Falcon and its intellectual descendants have helped prevent between $500 billion and $2 trillion in losses from fraud since its launch.

What’s in your wallet? The future.

The true impact of Falcon isn’t in what it prevented. It’s in what it helped unleash: e-commerce at a massive scale. To understand what I mean, ask yourself if the global e-commerce market, which is expected to reach $39.5 trillion by 2026, could exist without automated fraud-detection software working silently in the background.

I’ve conducted this thought experiment myself and I can’t square it with the Internet-based marketplace that billions of us use to buy and sell goods and services of all types. I typically wind up picturing two hypothetical worlds. In one, credit-card fraud is unchecked. In another, it’s less so – but at an unimaginable cost: the cost of employing an army of human workers to search for red flags among seemingly endless reams of data.

In either of these two imaginary cases, the conditions for building the viable, global e-commerce system of today would not exist. In one, consumer and business confidence would be persistently undermined. In the other, the economics would not pencil out. Either way, e-commerce wouldn’t have taken off, and the societal benefits it has helped to bring about would be missing. I’m not solely referring to well-documented economic improvements like greater prosperity and reduced poverty; I’m thinking about the lifeline e-commerce provided to hundreds of millions of people during the pandemic, or the way in which ride-sharing services – powered by e-commerce – have allowed people in under-resourced communities to access reliable transportation on demand.

Throughout history, we’ve seen countless examples of new technologies disrupting traditional industries and, in the process, unleashing greater prosperity and convenience, unlocking better opportunities for workers, and empowering communities and governments to address social and economic inequalities. The development of AI-powered platforms – whether it’s Falcon or ChatGPT or whatever follows – is just the latest example of this technological evolution that has repeated itself for centuries.

And that’s why ChatGPT and its ilk should be viewed as an opportunity, not a threat. AI is just like every technology our civilization has invented: it’s a tool. Those who master the tool can create new opportunities for themselves and others. Those who cling to the status quo risk being left behind.

Those who master the tool can create new opportunities for themselves and others. Those who cling to the status quo risk being left behind.

By embracing the tool that is AI, we can harness its power to bring about significant benefits, just as Falcon paved the way for the global, digitized marketplace of today. Instead of being intimidated by these new AI chatbots, we must learn to work with them to create better opportunities for ourselves and society.