We wanted voice AI in our payments app. Here’s what we cut.

Glomo's product design team cut a planned voice payment assistant down to one job, repeating a past payment, and kept the final approval on screen with a face check.

Aakash Mahadevan, a product designer at Glomo, a cross-border payments company, describes a voice AI assistant planned for the Glomo account, an app for holding a balance and paying people. A hard design review before any code was written found that spoken payment requests were ambiguous and that a screen-free design was unsafe. The team rebuilt the idea around one rule: speech prepares a payment and the screen confirms it.

• One example request, "Pay Rahul $1,000 using HDFC Bank", could point to several people named Rahul and to either of two bank accounts.
• As the assistant listens, a payment card fills in on screen, and the payee, exact amount, fee and Face ID approval always happen on screen.
• The first version only repeats payments to saved payees from the Glomo balance, with a cap per payment, identity checks before the microphone opens and English only.
• Before building, the team plans a Wizard of Oz test with eight to ten customers, with a target of zero payments to the wrong person.

A design team adding an AI assistant to a risky action can let the assistant prepare the action and keep the approval on a screen the person reads. The design has not yet been tested with customers.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: Your voice never approves a payment.

1 November 2026: Teams putting AI agents to work decide in advance which steps a person must still take, and that person carries more review and a greater duty to push back.