Stripe’s Push to Bring AI to Payments, Commerce

Absolutely. So I'm talking to you here from Stripe Sessions where we have 10,000 people here working on the economic infrastructure for AI. AI is changing a huge amount of how businesses sell and trade online. And so that could be everything from on the consumer side of things. Customers are now, I mean, you've probably done this, they're researching products within the AI apps. And we just had Google announcing that they're joining us. We work with Google and Microsoft and OpenAI and Meta for buying within their apps. And so that's one example of how previously you might have Googled around, you might have seen some reviews online. Now you're doing that product research and actually completing the transaction within the AI apps. It's also really changing tech companies how they sell because previously they might have sold to a human. You know, if you're a Cloudflare or Vercel, you might have sort of a human buyer. Now coding agents are doing so much work, we can delegate the work to the coding agents. And so increasingly tech companies are selling to coding agents directly and they're being used by coding directly as a result to real people. And so it's completely changing the landscape. The changes have fraud works as well. We're seeing new fraud patterns that businesses have to prevent against. The big theme here is that the economy is really replatforming around the AI and businesses are totally different offerings.

Yeah. You know, I think when people talk about this, it seems really far off. I mean, part of that is, you know, the examples people give almost sounds incredibly far off where it's like, oh, I'll just have my agents plan my entire summer vacation, you know, in France where it's like, no, but, you know, to the summer vacation, you want to do that yourself. Whereas if you say, okay, you just give your AI this is the recipe I'm making tonight. Buy the things I don't have in the fridge already. That's the kind of delegation that, you know, people are much more comfortable with. And so we think people and AI services kind of work their way up the trust curve. Again, it's already the case that the research you're doing, the research you do, you do with in the AI, you're probably still confirming that directly, but it might get to the case where you're allowed to make smaller decisions for you and especially as it gets to know you. And so, again, on the developer side, imagine you're building a website and you need a hosting provider or you need to buy a domain name. For us today, it's the case that you go and you like find the domain name buying service yourself and you go fill out the form and everything like that. You just want the domain name. You can get it from multiple providers. You'd probably be okay with Claude Code or Codex or Cursor or whatever you're using, actually choosing how to buy a domain for you. And so it's already the case that people are doing a lot of interactive buying with AI for their improving the final step. We think people are already starting to have a little bit and a huge amount of what we announced today is those little decisions. People are delegating them. They find your domain name again, it's the example I would give. And then as they start to see that it works really well, you know, people would just give them more and more rope.

I mean, there's a few trends that are overlaid here, I would say. One is checking out is getting much more convenient. Apple Pay and Google Pay within their respective ecosystems have made it that much more convenient. We also now we have a product called Link, which we talked a lot about today, and that has gotten to considerable scale. We have 250 million people. You probably use it around the web where, you know, you see a straight line and it just remembers your details. It makes it more convenient. And so making those purchases. And again, as the volume of purchases goes up, has gotten significantly more convenient. But then again, like we're saying, the place where the purchases will actually happen is starting to change. Where previously, you know, you're doing some research, you find the product you want to buy. I was shopping for a travel adapter recently. It's like, okay, I want one with like an integrated power brick. But eventually you get bounced out to the, you're having to fill out all these details. You kind of want to be able to tell your AI app, okay, that sounds good. Please go buy it for me. And that's what's changing where the transaction getting pulled into the AI, where it's already the case, where many things you do, you want to be able to say, yeah, sounds good. Please go do this. You know, again, if you're using a coding agent, it's frequently, you know, yes, go make no mistakes. And people want to do that in the shopping context. And so the purchase gets pulled up into there. And we're seeing huge demand for businesses. You know, we're working with all the biggest brands you can imagine Best Buy, Kate Spade, folks like this who see this new kind of buying that's happening, this new kind of product discovery and they want to be part of it.

I mean, I think Google has done a phenomenal job in commerce generally. And I mean, again, Google Pay is very large and successful within the Android ecosystem. And so I don't think that would be quite a fair characterization. And I think they've done a phenomenal job enabling commerce. And again, this is a new tool in the toolbox for them right now. They're enabling within Gemini these amazing generative commerce experiences, which again, we think just has to be the future because it's so much more convenient for consumers. That's never been the case in technology when you get way more convenient way of working for consumers. They pick the less convenient one. It's never happened. Has to be the future.