John Collison, Stripe: AI Agents Will Rewire the Internet

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Please join me in welcoming to the stage Mollie O'Shea and John Collison.

Molly O'Shea (0:09)

John, thank you very much. And Paul, thank you very much. I hope you guys are all having a really great day, enjoying everything Browserbase. So, we're going to talk about payments, agenda commerce and everything that's going on in the computer. So, Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in 2025, up 34%. Sounds right. How are you rebuilding for AI?

John Collison (0:34)

Look, it's really interesting right now, because we've been working on Stripe for a long time, right? We've been, this is our 17th year doing it. And for many years in the payments industry didn't really change that much.

And now, there's just like some small changes happening where, I mean, leave aside everything that's going on in stable coins and like all that other interesting stuff, but other than that, it's all the same old.

Molly O'Shea (0:59)

So instinct is real, muse is real?

John Collison (1:02)

All these things are real. Again, you have people in the audience, like you saw a significant fraction of the audience using them. And okay, I think it turns out one, filling out a web form is not a value add activity for anyone. Like no one chooses to fill out web forms in their spare time. And so, I think the whole conceit of these agents, and obviously, again, this is where Browserbase and computer use comes in, but when you have the stateful context where your agent knows things about you, like the basic one is it knows your shipping address and payment details and things like that, and then when it can manipulate a computer and go off and do things in the real world, it turns out it's much nicer to be able to say, hey, please renew my driver's license for me or whatever the task is, rather than go play with web forms. And so, I actually think one big part of all these personal agents starting to work is actually giving them a meaningful amount of compute so you can go do stuff. But another one is computer use actually becoming a mature enough technology because computer use is the ultimate backwards compatibility layer for the real world. Like, how long would you need to wait for the DMV to add an MCP? Like, I'm not a betting man, but I'm betting we would have to wait a few years. But it doesn't matter because computer use solves that. And so again, it's the ultimate backwards compatibility there.

Molly O'Shea (2:20)

So you've mentioned that agentic commerce is a complete rewiring. What do you mean by it's completely rewiring?

John Collison (2:27)

A few things. One is like it's rewiring things at the surface level where how businesses sell is going to change pretty significantly. Like the first order of change is that we think people's agents are going to be doing a huge amount of commerce for them.

The second change is maybe, or the second order change, is it probably changes the commerce landscape a little bit. And so again, I don't know what people bought in their experiences, but my experience of doing AI-powered product research is it often actually surfaces niche brands or businesses you haven't heard of. Like I think it's quite a good story for the long tail of businesses. I think it's quite empowering that if you have a product that actually is well reviewed and that people like on the internet, it leads to more discovery of that. And so I think the existing aggregators are gonna have to answer questions, because in a way, AI discovery is the new point of aggregation for commerce. And so you probably have a bit of a turning over of the top businesses that's gonna happen, where if you are selling a really good product, if you're making it discoverable, then you can kind of shoot up in the rankings. I think the analogy for this is when Facebook and Instagram ads targeting was so good that it led to a whole new generation of companies that were built around targeting on those platforms and they were native to it. Think of a wish.com or a Teespring or even Tmoo and Cheon, to a significant degree, grew up on those platforms and did a huge amount of customer acquisition on those platforms, and they were able to more natively adopt it than the prior generation of big box retailers, who in theory had all the same tools available to them, but they were just less native to that kind of customer acquisition technology, and it's got to flow all the way downstream to the product creation and things like that.