How Stripe sees agentic commerce developing

Stripe is designing its agentic AI commerce flows to be ready for when AI agents are going to transact without humans in the loop and become significant economic players.

Speaking at the AWS Financial Services Industry Analyst Day in New York, two Stripe executives walked through how agentic commerce is going to change everything from how brands are viewed to loyalty and checkout friction. Stripe runs entirely on AWS.

Danny Smith, Agentic Commerce Solution Architect Lead at Stripe, said commerce players need to "rethink how you're presenting your entire experience."

Smith added:

"Agents are like brutally honest shoppers, like they don't get distracted by fashion banners and things like that. Checkout friction is more important than ever."

Smith said Stripe customers are focused on the following three things when it comes to agentic commerce.

Discoverability. "If I'm not discovered by this new buyer, having instant checkout doesn't matter," said Smith. He said merchants need clear product descriptions that directly answer a question.

Checkout friction. Smith said checkout abandonment is an issue, but needs to be eliminated for agents. If checkout takes too long, say more than 800 milliseconds. "Customer experience needs to be refactored away from human behavior to agent behavior," said Smith. "Agents expect a frictionless checkout."

Brand identity. Smith said merchants recognize that the AI agent is a new entity and it will redefine loyalty. Retailers have focused on human loyalty primarily. The biggest worry is that agents will sit between the brand and the consumer. Another worry is that brands won’t be able to maintain identity, offers and loyalty programs in agent-drive commerce flows.

Jennifer Lee, Product Manager at Stripe Agentic Commerce, said agentic commerce has accelerated and will impact B2B and retail. "Agents are not just chatbots to give you answers, but can transact with the outside world. Agents will be a significant factor in the Internet economy. Humans won't be in the loop. This is level five of agentic commerce where an agent anticipates your needs as well," said Lee.

Agentic commerce will also accelerate due to the use of coding agents that will make commerce accessible to everyone, she added.

Lee said business-to-business commerce has multiple use cases for AI agents.

Stripe's product velocity

Smith and Lee said Stripe has accelerated its product development via the use of AI and to enable agentic commerce.

At Stripe's recent Stripe Sessions conference, the company launched 288 products and services including Link Agent Wallet, a wallet for agents, support for AI-native business models and expansion of Stripe Treasury.

The Link Agent Wallet from Stripe is built on Link, the company’s consumer checkout identity system, and let’s humans specify which agent can spend, how much and where.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collision said, "AI is the biggest platform shift for the economy since the internet" and "agents will account for most transactions online."

The company’s Agentic Commerce Suite, launched in December, moved to support Google AI Mode and Gemini and has integrations with OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta. Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite supports both consumer and B2B commerce flows.

Stripe also touted streaming payments, which accounts for how AI products charge for tokens. Streaming payments combines precise tracking with stablecoin micropayments on the Tempo blockchain.

What's next?

According to Lee, agentic commerce is in the early iterations but emerging issues include:

• Transaction volume is going to surge.
• Do merchants favor agent traffic or human traffic? Do they create two experiences?
• Fraud prevention will be critical even though agentic commerce hasn't led to more fraud.
• Will merchants create sites specifically for AI agents that are programmed dynamically?
• Should AI agent identities be paired with a human identity?
• Can agents lead to a micro-transaction format as AI agents hire other agents to carry out transactions?