Stripe's AI Chief: How AI Agents Will Buy, Sell, and Pay
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What is agentic e‑commerce and why is it emerging now?
Fraudsters have figured out that in AI, you actually don't really need to steal money or credentials. You can just steal tokens. And the scale of this actually shocked me when I looked at the data. So more than one in six signups at AI companies are this kind of abuse. Whatever, the dine and dash, but it's for tokens. When I go and ask my friends and family whether they'd be comfortable letting an agent buy things on their behalf, they usually Jump straight to like, well, is it gonna overspend and is it gonna buy the wrong thing? And can I stop it? And those are actually all legitimate concerns. And it's not Emily permissioning an agent to buy on her behalf. It's Emily has an agent who's tasked with running a business, and that includes buying some things and selling some things and making some profits.
And that'll be the world that I would like to be talking about 12 months from now.
Hi, I'm Matt Turk. Welcome back to the Matt Podcast. Today I'm excited to be joined again by Emily Sands, Head of Data and AI at Stripe. The rise of agente commerce has only accelerated since Emily and I talked about it last year. And in this conversation, we go deep on the economic stack for AI agents, how agents buy and sell on your behalf, why per seat pricing is breaking, token monetization, token theft. Which Emily calls the most under-discussed topic in all of AI, and finally, whether agents may eventually run entire businesses on their own. Please enjoy my conversation with the always excellent Emily Sands. All right, so welcome back. You and I chatted about a year ago, and the theme of the discussion uh we had was all about the rise of genetic commerce, keeping in mind that obviously this is a long term trend uh that's gonna take a while to play out.
I'm curious about what you've observed over the last twelve months. What has become reality and what is yet to be built?
Yeah. I mean a year ago we were talking about agents as buyers in a pretty hypothetical way. I think the canonical experiences, the consumer experiences, for example, weren't defined. We were largely reasoning kind of from first principles about what this might look like. Fast forward a year, as you know, like still early innings, still a lot to do, but we have actual infrastructure deployed. Real companies building on it, we have real patterns to learn from. And to be clear, like the shape of how this unfolds has become more clear and it's going to continue to evolve. So specifically, what we've come to believe is there's a full spectrum of how agentic commerce plays out. And that's actually really important for businesses in how they think about it.
So at one end, and this is way Where our machine payments protocol lives. But basically, you have agents that are out autonomously discovering a service and deciding to buy it and handling the transactions entirely on their own, right? Like no human in the loop. And that's maybe what people think of when they say agent e commerce, but that's just one end of the spectrum. There's also the whole other end of the spectrum where people are looking for shoes for flat-footed runners. inside an AI surface, and the AI surface gives you an answer. And increasingly, you know, that was true also in sort of traditional search, but now increasingly that answer comes with a buy button. And so you know this is already how a huge number of people are discovering products.
If you're a business, you need to show up there. And we've been building the infrastructure to make it, A, easy for businesses to show up, and B, easy for agents to execute those Transactions. So you asked about sort of what's become more concrete. We recently partnered with Google so merchants can sell right inside AI mode and the Gemini app. So maybe you shop at JD Sports, because I was on the topic of Ready Shoes or Fanatics or Quints. Those were all early adopters. Microsoft and OpenAI were doing something similar with them, like helping businesses make their products discoverable inside Copilot and ChatGPT. Um, meta's another example, a little bit of a different flavor, but we're powering checkout right inside ads.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is agentic e‑commerce and why is it emerging now?
0:00–9:01
2
How do AI agents differ in autonomy when buying products?
9:01–17:46
3
What is the Agent E‑Commerce Protocol (AEP) and how does it work?
17:46–28:28
4
How do shared payment tokens and the Link wallet make AI transactions secure?
28:28–38:05
5
Why is trust the biggest roadblock for AI‑driven commerce?
38:05–47:06
6
What is “vibe deployment” and why is it a bottleneck for AI‑built businesses?
47:06–55:38
7
How are token theft, fraud, and real‑time billing reshaping the AI economy?
55:38–1:04:42
8
What will agentic commerce look like in the next 12 months?
1:04:42–1:14:57
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck
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