AI agents are poised to radically reshape how we buy stuff online, a top Stripe executive predicts.
“It’s been very easy to get through a checkout page these days, but should you even need to go to one, or should you just be able to say buy it on a product display page? I think so,” Will Gaybrick, Stripe president, technology and business, said during a recent episode of the “A16z Show.”
There are still “open questions” about what agentic commerce will look like exactly, Gaybrick said. He said even a “less ambitious form” of agentic commerce will be the end of checkout pages.
“We think machines will want to buy from other machines,” he said. “And there’s really a question of what should checkout look like for agents?”
Gaybrick said there hasn’t yet been a breakout moment for agentic commerce, but Stripe is laying the foundation for such advancements. He pointed to Stripe’s “Link” and Shopify’s “Shop Pay,” both of which are quick-pay tools that already streamline the checkout process.
Gaybrick said internally, Stripe has shifted its view “from being a payments company with sort of add-ons to now being this multi-product platform.”
Less clear is how quickly this change may occur.
Agentic AI is still relatively new and is an additional step beyond chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. By design, agentic AI is supposed to make proactive decisions with only minimal human direction, though the leash users give AI tools can be adjusted. In the context of shopping, it means users would have to entrust AI with some purchasing authority.
In June, Commerce, an Austin-based e-commerce company, and PayPal said that a survey of online shoppers in the US, UK, and Australia found that consumers were still hesitant to trust AI to buy without approval.
“Consumers want the time and money savings that agentic commerce can deliver, but they aren’t ready to trust agents as an autonomous buyer,” Sharon Gee, senior vice president of AI for products at Commerce, said in a statement.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison is also bullish about the future of agentic commerce.
“All the commerce is going agentic,” Collison said during a live interview on TBPN in April. “People will still be doing stuff, but they will do it through their agent.”
Collison gave the example of trying to buy a case for his bike and going back and forth with ChatGPT over what he wanted.
“At the end of that, you just want to be able to hit buy rather than like no one wants to fill out web forms,” he said. “It’s not a value-add activity.”
More broadly, Collison, his brother John, Stripe’s president, and Gaybrick already think an important threshold has been reached. In a letter to investors, obtained by Axios, the trio said that singularity, the theoretical moment where AI surpasses human intelligence, had been reached in January.
“The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously,” the trio’s letter read.
