Stripe on Agentic Commerce: Can AI Agents Buy From You?

Emily Sands (0:00)

Well, we didn't change anything in the product, and all of a sudden, just like, went vertical. And it was because the agents had found it.

Nate B. Jones (0:06)

In that world, how do we scale trust? How do we scale trust when the agents are supposed to be transacting?

Emily Sands (0:13)

And most of the sort of existential abuse that AI companies are facing is actually pre-transaction, outside of the transaction. And that is, you know, basically stealing tokens instead of stealing money. Well, guess who doesn't talk to sellers?

Nate B. Jones (0:29)

Who doesn't talk to sellers, Emily?

Emily Sands (0:31)

Agents don't talk to sellers.

Nate B. Jones (0:33)

Are you with me?

Emily Sands (0:34)

Agents are just relentless. Like, they're willing to negotiate as long as they need to negotiate. They'll come back again and again. And you could imagine that like, you know, consumer surplus, for example, like could be eroded relatively quickly.

Nate B. Jones (0:47)

I'm here at Stripe because Stripe is what is making the future of buying and selling on the Internet possible. So right now, most of the AI that we have is in our pockets, and we think of it as it gets the email done. We think of it as maybe it helps us put a doc together.

For a lot of us, we're not thinking of it as something that buys and sells. And if we do, that comes up in like the sci-fi movies we don't want to watch.

What would happen if we actually made that safe? What would happen if we actually made that something that we could trust? That's the question I wanted to get at chatting with Emily at Stripe today. Because for me, if I think about all the stuff that I have to deal with, and I'm a busy dad, and I've got a lot to do, so much of the time, I am making transactions, purchase decisions that I have to do, that I don't want to spend a lot of time on, but I'd better approve them because I don't want someone else doing it. And then, you know, who knows what will happen? So the whole story of agents is the story of getting a computer to do something that you can 100% of the time trust. Now, I'm not here to tell you that we are at 100% yet. I wouldn't want to give you that confidence. But that percentage has been rising really, really rapidly, and that is one of the reasons I keep talking about AI on this channel all the time. And one of the things that that has made possible is this conversation with Stripe, because we are now at a point in our trust story where I can actually give AI a wallet.

And I can trust it to go do something like buy me coffee. Would I trust AI to buy me a couch yet? No, not yet. Would I trust AI to sign up for a subscription yet? Probably not yet. Would I trust AI to do something specific for me within a given budget, like buy coffee? Yeah, I would. And so I sat down with Emily, and I got to chat with her about what Stripe is doing in that trust space and why it matters. And ultimately, if we get this right, we actually get a lot of our time back. We get money back in our pockets. We can actually spend time on the things we care about and not the things that feel like drudgery to us. So I'm really excited for this one. I hope you enjoy this conversation. I had fun chatting with Emily. Emily, tell me about you. How did you get to Stripe?

Emily Sands (3:06)

I've been at Stripe about five years.

Nate B. Jones (3:08)

Okay.

Emily Sands (3:09)

Boy, a lot has changed over that period. It hasn't been a quiet one.

Nate B. Jones (3:12)

It has not been a quiet one.

Emily Sands (3:13)

I'm an economist by training. So I was pretty obsessed with how we could create more quality of opportunity in the labor market back as I was in grad school, and so defected from academia after the PhD and went to Coursera.

I don't know if you've ever been a learner.

Nate B. Jones (3:28)

I have been a learner. I've used Coursera.

Emily Sands (3:30)

Yeah. I thought, hey, what better way to create more opportunity in labor market than to level the playing field in education. So it was there about eight years, and then joined Stripe originally to look after data science. We started working through what's possible with Stripe data, and sort of built out the org to cover everything from ML infrastructure and agent infrastructure to our user-facing data products and a bunch of our experimental bets. So it's been a fun run.