Luke Gebb, head of global innovation at American Express, agrees that the pace of technology-led change has intensified exponentially during his more than two decades with the financial services firm.
“It has, no doubt,” he says, before pointing to artificial intelligence (AI) as the next driver of radical business transformation.
“There are different waves. You can draw comparisons at this moment to the advent of the internet itself, or the mobile wave. Those comparisons are good. However, the pace of change and innovation we’ve seen recently is probably faster than we’ve seen before.”
As head of global innovation, Gebb leads Amex Digital Labs, an innovation hub focused on creating new digital products and features for the firm’s card members. He works across the enterprise to accelerate the adoption and commercialisation of emerging technologies, such as generative AI, agentic commerce and blockchain.
Gebb says his team is focused on innovation areas where business units don’t have the time or expertise to turn their ideas into products or services. The team’s goal is to bring these ideas to market, pilot them, see if they work, make them stable, and then graduate these finalised products to the business units.
“It’s a fun role,” he says. “We have a permanently interesting job that is always changing as technology trends come and go. Amex has about 120 people working in innovation, trying to push about 20 things into the market each year, where we’re learning from customers and focused on new experiences powered by up-and-coming technologies.”
Catching the entrepreneurial bug
Gebb joined Amex out of college and worked for the company for the last five years of the 1990s. After working in strategic planning and new business development, he decided to scratch an itch and join a startup.
“During my career, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I loved entrepreneurship and new product development,” he says.
“I had done a little bit of that work at Amex and got the bug. Then I went to the web 1.0 startup and saw what it can be like in a smaller company with fewer resources and less ability to plan for the long term.”
“I’m clearing blockages to innovation for anyone across the company. I’m also connected with a lot of the most groundbreaking projects in the company”
Luke Gebb, Amex Digital Labs
When the startup failed, Gebb saw there was an opportunity to return to Amex. He rejoined the firm in September 2002 and has since worked in a broad range of roles. The breadth of challenges and experiences has meant there’s always been something new and interesting to get involved with during his 25 years at the firm.
“There just kept being great things to do internally,” he says. “I spent a lot of years creating Amex Offers, which is the programme attached to everyone’s card. I ran many entrepreneurial activities in the company. That trend continued and accelerated with the creation of Amex Digital Labs, because it’s basically what we do constantly.”
Before his current role, Gebb was senior vice-president of enterprise digital at Amex, leading the company’s web, mobile, partner and digital payments platforms. He formed and has led Digital Labs since September 2017, becoming global head of innovation last October.
“The core of my role is running the lab, but I’m also helping lots of other teams around the company accelerate and helping them to elevate issues that get in the way of internal innovators,” he says.
“I’m clearing blockages to innovation for anyone across the company. I’m also connected with a lot of the most groundbreaking projects in the company, and just being in touch, trying to help people move as fast as possible and take the best paths.”
Acting as an interface
So, what blockages can hinder enterprise innovation? Gebb says financial services firms have to navigate a range of governance processes, many of which predate the AI era. His team’s role is to ensure the rest of the business doesn’t encounter choppy waters during the product innovation journey.
“We’re just trying to make sure that our processes are customised to the level of risk of a project. By all means, if someone is looking at a new way of moving money, or something else that carries a significant amount of risk, then run it through all the stops,” he says.
“But if someone is developing something that helps customers learn how to find a restaurant, it shouldn’t undergo the same level of rigour. Of course, we want to make sure everything we launch works well, but we’re also trying to evolve most of our processes to be risk-adjusted.”
As head of innovation, therefore, Gebb holds a crucial role as an interface between the business and its technology professionals. As someone who developed his credentials in consulting and product development, he says he’s more of a business professional than a technologist – and it’s a skillset that works well on a day-to-day basis.
“I didn’t start as an engineer,” he says. “But one of the secret sauces of my team and I is an ability to understand deeply what technology makes possible and to work well with engineers, despite, in my case, not having an engineering background.”
Innovations continue to bubble up, including AI and other emerging technologies. Gebb says the risks mean he can understand why some people might be concerned by the pace of transformation. However, he also recognises the potential for positive change.
“At the end of the day, my optimism wins out,” he says. “Certainly, like anyone, I have days where I’m like, ‘Oh my’ – just read the news on any given day – and I can have my moments of concern. But I think I’m more optimistic than anything else.”
Developing trusted agentic transactions
Gebb’s sense of optimism is helping to drive Amex AI-enabled innovations forward. He says these developments focus on two key areas.
“The main zones that are dominating what we’re up to these days are agentic commerce and public blockchains,” he says.
“They’re the big trend lines of our day. We also continue to run the company’s digital wallets, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, and enhance them. We work with those companies, and there are good synergies to having those products on the team.”
In terms of agentic commerce, Gebb says Amex developments are focused on a few zones. First, enabling payments so that agents can buy products safely and effectively. The firm recently announced the launch of its Amex Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit, a new framework designed to create trusted transactions as the industry moves towards AI agents purchasing goods on consumers’ behalf.
“It’s setting out our vision and specifications for how we feel agentic commerce should work,” says Gebb.
Alongside the launch of the ACE Kit, the company also introduced Amex Agent Purchase Protection, a commitment to protect card members from AI agent errors that lead to charges. Gebb says this careful approach will help to address one of the biggest issues as agent-driven shopping becomes mainstream.
“If a registered agent shares card member intent with us and we approve the transaction and it happens, the card member intent was clear, the merchant delivered what they were supposed to, and the [AI] agent is the one with the error, we’re going to cover the card member and credit them so that they are not out of pocket for that kind of situation,” he says.
Beyond payments, Gebb says his team is looking at ensuring Amex assets and features, such as offers and booking mechanisms, are available when customers use large language models (LLMs). The team is also building proprietary experiences, so customers using the company’s mobile app and website, for example, can converse with agents about services.
Gebb says these developments are advancing at pace and more will become apparent in the next 12 months.
This is a year of foundations and a year of beginnings. We’ll see transactions start to happen in some of the early logical places where people will trust their [AI] agent to do certain things for them Luke Gebb, Amex Digital Labs
“This is a year of foundations and a year of beginnings,” he says. “We’ll see transactions start to happen in some of the early logical places where people will trust their agent to do certain things for them.”
Pioneering new technology services
When it comes to blockchain-centred innovations, Gebb says Amex recently launched a product called Passport, which creates unique NFTs for customers travelling the globe and using the firm’s mobile app.
“It’s been created to replicate the feeling of showing someone your physical passport,” he says. “Most of our users have no idea that this service is built on a public blockchain, or that it’s an NFT. Technically, they just like seeing their history, adding things to it, adding memories or pictures or whatever, and being like, ‘Check out all the places I went to’.”
Gebb says his team is also exploring stablecoins. Developments in this area are still in their early stages. However, he says the technology continues to grow in importance. More generally, the innovations supported by his team illustrate the broad direction of travel – pioneering the next generation of commercial activity alongside traditional mechanisms.
“At the advent of e-commerce, people thought the high street would go away and there would be no physical stores. At the advent of mobile, people thought there would be no websites,” he says. “And here we are in another one of these moments. I think, for the foreseeable medium term, agents will be like an augmentation to how commerce is done.”
The basic message, says Gebb, is that websites will continue, as will stores in the real world. While we’re not witnessing a radical change in commerce right now, the human-agent relationship will continue to develop and evolve.
“In the medium term, I don’t think agentic commerce and blockchain will replace everything that has come before,” he says. “However, I do think LLMs are getting better at such a rapid rate that people’s trust and use of them will continue to scale, and that will be interesting, as people have trusted agents they use for different things.”
