Stripe's Jeff Weinstein on agentic commerce: AI agents will buy on your behalf through permissioned wallets

the Irish hit intercom. We'll check in on how the luck of the Irish is treating Stripe. We got There he is from Stripe. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? The moment we've been waiting for. We're so sorry for a week. a couple weeks ago. It wasn't our fault. It wasn't our fault.

Geopolit geopolitics is currently outside of each of your controls. Uh well, that wasn't that wasn't even geopolitics domestic politics. That was South Afric South African attacking an American on the timeline. A reality TV star. Yeah. Former reality TV star. Yes.

Jordy, I have to say it's really awesome to see you in this format because you and I have been zooming for I think almost a decade now and now it's live in front of all these uh this great audience. It's really great to see what y'all are up to. It's It's a bummer.

I don't We've never met in person, but I've had so many Zooms with you in this exact room. I have a theory that like you'd never leave this room, actually. But we're busy. Yeah, you're you're busy. Yeah. What What is the major update? We we we wanted to have you on to talk through it. Can you break it down for us?

I mean, I think it's more of a like it's more of a conversation. Jeff Jeff's like evolved his role over the last year was was running point on Atlas made it made it a platform that a meaningful percentage of C corps I think are started on Atlas today. Yeah, about one in six now are on that list.

Um, but about halfway through last year, we looked at what was happening in AI and started to get really serious at Stripe about not just the application of it inside of our business for preventing fraud and running our own uh payments foundation model, but also to help developers and businesses and consumers get ready for when AI starts to come to commerce.

I'm still a little surprised that we got self-driving cars before uh ubiquitous online commerce is mediated by agents.

But you can really start to feel that AI is now coming very close to commerce uh and will be part of buying decisions, discovery, execution of transactions and new ways that businesses can find their audiences online.

I mean I'm really quite impressed to see the rate at which discovery has changed and it feels like around the corner uh commerce and AI is going to be very closely mediated.

Talk about uh maybe some some early product experiment what you what you guys are experimenting on what you guys have already rolled out uh all that stuff. Yeah, what we've been trying to work with the fastest growing companies as they push the frontier of agentic commerce.

So, one of the first we worked with was Perplexity where they have this buy with Pro package inside of Perplexity where they show great e-commerce search results and then when you go to buy, you're not going to the merchants tab and dealing with the merchants web page.

uh you are actually just clicking buy and in the background a Stripe virtual card is spun up and given to an agent or any other automation process so that you can just have a completely seamless experience of buying in situ to where you're doing discovery and we're starting to see that in more and more places.

So recently, HIPP Camp, which is, you know, the cool kid way to book camping online, sort of Airbnb for uh places, they started to partner with Stripe to make national parks and state park inventory available to a wider audience because some of those checkout pages are hard hard to use.

That inventory is not naturally online, but these are amazing places for people to be able to camp. But there was just a huge I remember as a kid I I remember as a kid there was a there was a a place my family used to always go camping and my dad would like wake up at 5:00 a. m.

and just be refreshing this like terrible site when like the the campsites are so ready for the Age of Agent and it was like very unreliable like payments. So it was like it was the equivalent of like a street wear drop but like the you know like you know some state park was like managing it.

Um, I think we're going to see this more and more where the the inventory of the world is getting closer and closer to intent and agents are way to bring that bring them together and then it opens up really interesting questions that Stripe is trying to help answer developers.

What is the developer experience for being able to uh execute those purchases? We have this new order intense API that we're triing where you can just give a product URL and one of our agents will go buy it on your behalf.

uh we have we have new ways for businesses to be able to start to expose their inventory to agents in a safe and permissioned way and then as a consumer you know you should feel it it is reasonable to think actually that agentic processes is the last place you'd want when it comes to money uh you actually want that to be incredibly permissioned safe deterministic you know what's going to happen and so you can expect that the Stripe APIs are going to evolve for a new type of user in the world which is an agent that can safely be delegated with your permission to buy on your behalf.

Can you talk about uh Stripe Link and how that product might fit into uh a product like Perplexity? It feels like um it's great if it's one of those classic things in in AI and tech is like, "Okay, okay, great. It it uh you know, it surfaced the right product for me. Now I want it to buy it for me even faster.

Now I don't even want to go through the checkout process at all. " like there's like as soon as I get the the the the current thing, I want the next thing.

Um so, uh how h how do we see um that playing out with just making that commerce experience even more seamless or happening entirely inside of a chat interface or an agentic interface?

Yeah, we you know the borders of the internet are starting to blur and so you will soon be able to experience if you chat if you if you search for something on chat TV they already have these cute little uh shopping carts that link you out if you're sitting in cursor and you need access to a database cursor can recommend superbase and even start to accomplish your homework for you right in the editor but there is this like missing moment here right where okay Now I know about these products.

What am I supposed to do? Go to a new tab? Do an offline kind of feeling search?

Go through a bunch of blue links, find the website, go to the website, make an account, deal with the password problem, get a bunch of weird emails to confirm my password, find the settings page where I can get the billing information, pick my billing thing, put in my payment credential, get my API key, walk it all the way back.

It's like this, you know, I think we will start to see this as this loop that we've all been operating under for the past 20 years of the internet as very arcane very quickly.

Whereas you just want to delegate uh your payment credentials to a safe trusted place and stripe link is this payment wallet we've made over the last few years which is a cross internet payment wallet that works with cards and bank accounts and future other payment methods where if you log in once to link then you will be able to delegate safely your permissioned credentials with a virtual which with a virtualized token such that uh you can safely hand it off to a good good robot to buy on your behalf.

And so we we see this as a new borderless way that commerce can happen in a very permission safe fashion. Yeah. Um how how are you thinking about uh agentic commerce and stable coins? A lot of um you know there's a lot of commentary around uh stables and how they can be applied here.

oftentimes the people that just sort of default assume that agents and agentic software will use tokens uh you know whether they're stables or other tokens they usually have crypto you know funds or or crypto companies right so I've had maybe a more um middle of the road view where I can imagine aentic uh commerce experiences leveraging stable coins I can also imagine them leveraging cards and a and a bunch of other sort of forms of payments uh so I'm assum I mean you spent a lot of time thinking about this and you guys have obviously been acquisitive recently with with bridge and and privy um as well.

Yeah, this is one of the areas in which stripe is very problem solving solving oriented and not uh technology or particular um technique religious. Uh we think that humans are going to have a variety of ways that they want to pay and hold money.

Stable coins is a phenomenal way for many people in the world to to hold hold funds and for businesses to move it across borders. And so we expect that stable coins will be a very popular way for consumers and businesses to just interact with themselves.

Then you have businesses who are also going to have you know it they're they're going to have a long adoption curve uh when it comes to uh accepting and holding crypto assets.

And then in some purchases, stable coins might make sense between two parties that natively know how to interact in stable coin, but often it might be the case that Jordy has an MX card and the seller is expecting an a transaction and we're sort of missing a universal way for all these types of currencies and rails to work together.

Visa also announced a new way of of being able to to hash your card and give it to an agent with this Visa Agentic token where Stripe is one of the first partners to implement it. And I think we're just going to see this new proliferation of new ways that money can can transact between parties.

And we're going to need some type of sort of babbleish translation service across all of them because if you're going to pick one route then you're going to likely exclude many of the agent humans and businesses in the world. That makes sense.

How are you guys thinking of uh not not to go too broad but the business model of the internet agents you know change things.

The internet today is heavily reliant on uh ad you know advertising and if you have a bot you know just crawling a website you know you're or or even when you look at other other services and so we've talked Ben Thompson had some good writing around um just like what the future business model of the internet could look like and potentially micro payments.

But I think the takeaway from that, our takeaway is like there's so many different stakeholders that would need to find some type of alignment. Uh it's it's hard to see like the obvious path forward here. Yeah.

I I think the univer a universal want from businesses is just more channels to reach their customers and to be able to do so in more direct kinds of ways. And so if you go to, you know, a a SAS software provider and you said, "Hi, you know, I sort of two choices for you.

You can have this um very cool large budget for a 101 billboard and kind of hope that at 85 miles an hour developers like see your ad and then remember to implement it later or would you like them in situ as they're working to have agents mediate the purchase, recommend it and be able to like integrate an accomplisher thing in 5 seconds right right inside their editor like okay yes well first of all I'll do both but also this second one sounds very nice because I'll be able to direct directly attribute uh where it came from and be able to have a great uh uh CAC for that and you know the LTV should be even higher because the robot even integrated it directly and so I think that we're going to see new channels emerge for monetization both usage based through MCP or other ways that businesses are going to expose their APIs to agents but also for transactionbased referral fees which which will supplement uh affiliate um and then I think it'll be a new way for businesses to make sure that agents can read their docs, can read their product SKUs, can have access to that information in a new permissioned way.

I I really like the car copy talk that got posted last night where he basically said that if your docs involve a click, not good because agents want to act and not click and just only read. They want to start acting.

And so that's why Stripe is uh you know if you go to the stripe docs it we really push like hey here's our MCP where you can just just talk to the primary best way of integrating Stripe and it can do it on your behalf rather than you know just reading or reading something from a three-year-old corpus. Interesting.

Um last question for me we we we want to move on let you get back to your day. Uh, Stripe was famous early on for having this crazy kind of open culture around uh, emails that anyone from the entire organization could read.

That seems like incredible foresight to the moment today because you don't have all this private information that oh, do we train on that or not?

You could very easily uh fine-tune a model or do some sort of uh uh you know uh uh you know embedding on the emails that are already deemed to be worthy of the entire organization reading them. Is that still part of the culture?

Is there a tool if you join Stripe where you can get up to speed without needing to read every email but you can kind of get the the Stripe way of doing X Y or Z? Talk to me about Stripe's culture.

Stripes, you know, has a has a a very serious writing culture where any decision I I've been a part of for the last seven years.

I can really point to some Google doc that has the pros, the cons, and the decisions as well as the uh the the the sort of the email culture you mentioned where we just it's very common place at Stripe where if you write uh you spoke to a customer or even after going on TBNN, hi went on TBNN, you just CC a notes list and now it's available for anyone who wants to subscribe to notes list.

But one of the major subscribers to notes list now is agents. Interesting. And so if if I'm in Slack, uh we have this really awesome bot called Trailbot that's read the trail of everything, all the paper trail of everything that we've done that's permission to it.

And I can just say at Trailbot in any Slack room and it has the context both of the team Slack room I'm in, but also the full corpus of of Stripe and all of our permissioned uh wikis and documentation and internal internal tools. And it is it takes the first line of defense of most questions immediately.

And we actually have it to the point where it knows to jump in automatically without you even asking it. And so I I find that most of the time we're able to just at trailbot and answer a lot of questions. And then increasingly these agent tools which I think are going to apply to commerce soon quickly too.

They're not just readon. They're going to start taking right actions and purchase actions. And for Stripe, internally write actions might be to roll back that deploy or to uh you know autocommunicate to that customer because of a an MPF score under 10, which which we do often. Um hopefully not too often.

Uh but then in in the real world, if you want to make some of these actions, you're going to need to prove who you are, pay for it, make sure the merchant was able to accept that money, get the entitlement, and move on. Yeah.

Even something as simple as like you show up to a new company, hey, there's this system over here that we're using, and I don't have access. You might go to a wiki and ask, "How do I get access? " Now you just ask and it just does it for you.

It's so interesting to think about if if there's like some type of user flow where if somebody sends a Slack message, there's like a tiny delay built in and it gives like a bot an opportunity to like actually front run the question because it's like every message is going to waste like you know 10 minutes.

I a new version of shadow band where you first get your question answered and then go back. Do you really want to ask this question? Because it was answered here, here, here, here, here, and like here's our recommended action. Pro autocomplete. It's amazing. It'd be interest.

Yeah, Slack's just become completely silent because everybody's like doing things and it's just immediately getting at those of us who have nerdily taken notes and made docs over over years. That is somewhat. It was worth it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Made fun of by some people for a long time, but it all came back.

Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was great, Jeff. Always welcome. Yeah. Well, we'll have you back soon. We can talk more to you. It's great. Talk to you soon. Bye. Uh, let's give it up for Jeff. Next up,