Stripe's John Collison on How Agentic Commerce Will Reshape the Internet

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You just come up with an idea and you type it in English and then it's there. You know the hardest part registering a domain. Yeah. You complained about that. So everything else is so smooth, right? You just type it in English and then you like have your little app or whatever. And then it's like, oh, I'm going to put this somewhere on the web. But then you go to like a domain name registrar. I had been using a GoDaddy for a long time. And then it's like, that's it. This field for this field, this field for this field and toggle this and this worker, this page is in the a field, in the app field, in the B field. And I swear, that's like, it's like so maddening. I just hated it so much. It's so annoying. It's the hardest part of the whole aspect. I have terrible memories as well about dealing with blue hosts and things like that. Is this the first time you've ever set up a domain? No, there's the thing. This is the other thing. Yeah. I've done it before. Like if I've done it before and it's still incredibly annoying. And progress comes slow to domain registration. I mean, there's probably a good reason for it to be complicated. You don't want it to switch in the wrong direction. Anyway, I was very excited. It's a couple of weeks ago. There's actually, well, the two of us were in Madrid. The company striped, the payment's company announced that there was going to be some agreement with CloudFlair, which does a lot of web hosting stuff, where you could just have the agent buy a domain name for you. And so you think of one and you just type it in by this domain name and host it there. And I mean, like, oh my god, I wrote about it. The newsletter is like, this would be so, this would have been so nice a month or so. Yet another thing that you will never have to do again. Exactly. Let another. So, I mean, I saw the striped news and it generated a lot of buzz and it all comes under the umbrella, I guess, of agentic commerce. So this idea that you can have agents that are actually directly transacting on your behalf with other agents or other websites. And I have to say, as someone who shops online a lot, this is the first time I feel disintermediated by a. I'm actually particularly excited about this episode because I'm very curious, basically what you specifically will ask as someone is a personal shopper. I was going to say as a person of taste. As a person of taste, I have seen you say scrolling very nice paper like websites like wallpapers and things like that. And I'm curious, what does it mean for that? If your AI bought two years from now knows you so well, it's like Tracy, I thought you needed this new wallpaper because you're doing this. I just went ahead and ordered it to you to be delivered tomorrow. This changes the world. It brings up so many interesting questions about discoverability and taste as you mentioned and also just the nature of the internet because when I think about the internet, like a lot of other things, it's basically built to sell you things, whether that's products or information, content. And we know that it also runs on those sales in the sense that a lot of the internet is driven by advertising, which is related to traffic. Obviously, we actually did that episode way back about how the internet runs on millions of like add auctions. And so this topic of a gentick commerce and the payment system, obviously it's of interest to anyone who shops and does stuff online, but it's also really relevant to actual evolution of the internet. Couldn't agree more and I would go further into it. It's really important for like culture itself, advertising, creation of culture, ads are influential, ads, do all this stuff. What if there's a changing advertising, all these kinds of stuff? Anyway, let's stop hearing from ourselves. We really do have the perfect guest. Someone we've wanted to talk to for a long time, someone who's right and the thick of it and all this stuff with the gentick commerce and payments. We're going to be speaking with John Coleson, the president and co-founder of Stripe. So John, thank you so much for coming on out lots. Great to be here. I'm very excited. Yeah, buzzwords, etc. What is quote, "agentic commerce" unquote? Yeah, so there's a bit of a definitional question, but broadly is AI buying something for you? Okay. And we think about this in two categories. One is on the consumer side of things. This is where you are skeptical whether Tracy will ever be an adopter, where you research something in chat, you be dear, Claude or what have you and then go by as they are, it buy it for you. But then the second is your cloud flare example. And so it's B2B or developer led agentic commerce, where you're just trying to have Claude code do something for you. And as part of it, it needs to buy resources and we can talk about that because they're quite different. Yeah, Tracy and we'll get to this, but the resources is another thing I've wanted about. Which is that when you do an API key, you're like, have an idea and you're like, oh, you have to go to the web and you sometimes have to enter credit card number. That's really annoying, etc. We'll get into that, but that is another big element of it that I feel like is getting closer to being solved. Okay, well on this credit card point, I mean, the history of online payments is basically a continuous elimination of the friction, right? And going from I have to enter my credit card details to I have to log into PayPal to now I can just basically click a button, whether it's Apple Pay or something else. Is agentic commerce is this just another leg of the frictionless process or is something fundamental in your view changing here? Both. So part of agentic commerce is just reducing the friction and you're right that the general direction of travel over time, you back the introduction of credit cards when the earliest adopters of computer networks and then the originally commerce and now like you're saying while it's like Apple Pay and Google Pay and we have a protocol link and things like that, there's generally been this elimination of friction. And our view is that at a very minimum, we're going to see, and Tracy, I think this is where you can maybe get behind us, is leave aside any agent decision making that's happening. Just the final step of buying something, you know, you might have researched a product in an AI app before where you're going back and forth. I was trying to buy a bike case recently to travel with my bike and you're asking all these questions hard versus soft and you need to take off the handlebars and what's the right one? It's finding all these cool little niche brands. I think it's actually quite good for small or merchants, by the way, because you have the ability for them to be discovered that they might not have had otherwise. But anyway, when you find the product at the very end, do you really then want to go and be filling out all these web form fields and things like that? Or do you want to just say, yeah, that sounds good, buy it for me in this size? And our best is that people want the lower friction option. I think in the history of technology, the lower friction option tends to win out. And so we think that clearly will happen and is happening to some degree already. It's just the agent filling out the forms for you. I think where you get this interesting question is, and when people hear Agents a commerce, I think their mind jumps to the agent actually having some autonomy and some decision making for you. I think they're the problem is people somehow jump to the examples and even who talks about this phenomenon, they pick terrible examples are like, oh, the agent will book all the activities on your vacation for you. It's like people think they daydream about their vacation all right. That's a fun part. Researching and booking is the fun part. That's a fun part. Or similarly with women's fashion, it's like the whole point is the scrolling, not just the buying. And so people pick these super enjoy it. Like it's the robots taking the jobs and people want to keep those scrolling jobs. And so when you think about robots having autonomy, I would instead offer some examples where you really don't need to be you give the AI a recipe and say, by the things that we need to make this tonight. And yeah, the AI can probably guess that you have salt and you have garlic at home, but you need the ground pork or again, then migrating to the B2B example, no one needs to configure yet another to Maine and go through all those forms if Claude Cove's and work with Cloudflare to buy the domain for you and set it up, I think Joe will be much happier and not feel like he's missed out on the value of a life experience. - I want to talk more about the B2B stuff, but let's for a moment stick around on the B2C element, 'cause I think there are great dishes of this. So one is just another elimination of the friction layer. At the far end of the spectrum, conceivably, there will be things where the AI truly does anticipatory buy you things that you didn't know you need, etc, and then there might be like some middle. I saw this screenshot recently and I couldn't find it before the episode, someone tweeted it, but some retailer, I think it was a shoe retailer, had put a bunch of shoes on their website, but instead of like putting any brand names on the shoe, like we would say like a Nike Pegasus or Nike Air Jordan, all of the shoes were like hiking boot that's good for semi-serious hiker. Do you see this currently? Like where we are on the agentic commerce trajectory? Do you see this currently where there's already a change in how retailers are presenting or displaying or promoting their wares such that they're more attuned for what the chatbot would identify or the AI would identify as cool versus what a human influenced by brands would pick up is cool. - Yes and no, I mean, there's definitely changes. I think some of the stuff that's most notable is often not the most relevant. It's a little bit of sounds like what you're describing is a little bit like the Thai restaurant calls Thai food near the end of the queue, do best in the SEO. But I think what we see as a kind of maybe a more interesting direction of travel is again, what's happening already? Some amount of the form fields being filled out for you and kind of the friction reduction and a huge amount of, again, I presume you guys have both done this, is at research in AI apps. And you know, the way I would frame that is just keyword search is ridiculous. We got to the year of 2026 relying on keyword search. Where that makes sense for buying a book or a DVD where you know the title of the book or DVD that you're trying to buy. But that's about the limit of keyword search. And so the fact that anyone was trying to buy furniture or clothes or anything like that and there was this text box at the top of the website where you put in your keywords. It's like that's just, that's how I know it shops in the real world, things like that. And so we're seeing this AI powered research where people can explore a product space and start to give constraints. And you have this textual search interface, but you end up with kind of much higher quality search where it's like, okay, I have a spot in this room where I'm looking for a piece of furniture that's this one, why is Max and this high? Because I need to fit it in there. That's the kind of thing that's just much better suited to the AI modalities. So you see different kinds of product research possible. And like we said, it's very helpful to smaller brands because people aren't necessarily stuck behind the traditional aggregators anymore. They can break out. And again, I have found in my little research projects that I've done, Fandering a Fada. You often get these small brands surfaced that you might have heard of before. And so we think it's actually probably quite good for the dynamism. - Well, let me ask Joe's question in a slightly different way, which is if we assume that in the future, if I'm a business selling something online, previously I was selling to humans more or less. Like maybe I'd optimize for Google search results or whatever, but like mostly I'm trying to appeal to humans. And now I'm trying to appeal more to agents. What is optimizing for agents actually look like? - Part of it is similar to traditional SEO, right? So you want to be legible to those agents. You want to be discovered by them. But part of what at least I've seen is that the AI's have pretty good taste. - Joe, I know if you've found this in your vibe coding. By the way, Joe, I'm reminded of it. It's sort of like the old joke. How do you know if someone vibe codes don't tell you about it? - They tell you about it. - Exactly. - Goldie and gold. - Goldie and gold. - I'm guessing you found that the AI's are very tasteful at picking libraries and picking specific subcomponents to use. And similarly in our kind of early experience of the agent of commerce, they're quite tasteful in finding tools that suit the job pretty well. And so I think you may get this more efficient market phenomenon where at least in picking coding libraries or something like that, the AI's have quite like I find to know when I do stuff, they're discovering libraries that are perfect for the job that I hadn't even heard of or something like that. And I think you're starting to see the same phenomenon with products where again, I have had the experience of trying to find a travel adapter. And I found it from this tiny company that I had never heard of but was doing exactly what I wanted to do. It's like an integrated travel adapter in PowerBerke. It's really good. And I would never have come across that company otherwise. This is incredibly important because as I mentioned the beginning advertising creates culture. It's part of culture, especially iconic advertising. And maybe it'll be a little while before the Nike's of the world. They're the Nike's and apples of the world. They're going to be advertising for a long time. But do you see this eventually a sort of like one of the things I think that the internet appreciates about Stripe as a company is you and your brother's commitment to interesting discussions of economics and so forth and you talk about econ history. There are great debates about whether ad spending is a huge dead weight loss on the economy or whether it's something positive, et cetera. And I'm curious could you see a sort of post advertising future, you know, at some point on the horizon? - No, I think we're quite skeptical of vast for two reasons. One, again, with agent to commerce, we don't think the human goes away and the human in the loop goes away. And there's a huge amount of agent to commerce that can happen like we're describing where you still have the human as the end decider. And so it will likely be the case that if you are searching for something, if you are on a new microphone for the Adlots Studio, you might ask it to go research and it'll present three or four different options. With different trade-offs, there's no right microphone that's going to be kind of cost-trade, nothing like that. And then ultimately, you will make a call and it'll go buy it for you. And when you make that call, some brand preference you have, oh, sure, I just know that they're like the ones with a really good sound quality, not clear why you have that association, maybe there's some advertising in there somewhere. But so we think brand preference, and as part of that advertising, will clearly stick around because again, it's definitely not going to be the case that agent to commerce means no humans make buying decisions. That's absolutely not our case. But again, this may be a good example. You want to buy new microphones for the studio. You do a lot of AI research, you then have a human decide, and then you do a lot of AI execution. And so it's AI on both sides and then human decision making in the middle. Brand affinity really matters in that world. The other thing, of course, is commerce can be directed or undirected, where the directed side, like I was saying, trying to buy a buy case, it's like, does the thing that I know I need to go do? I'm going to go do some research. Previously, you know, Google ad might have been relevant to me whereas now it's part of peers in the AI search results. Obviously that does remove some advertising, but for now at least, maybe some of the AI apps at least choose to bring back some advertising in those cases. But then a lot of shopping is undirected where you're scrolling Instagram and the joke goes to these days on Instagram, the ads are better than the organic content because they've gotten so good with the targeting and this is the nice reassuring things that you might want to buy. And there that is advertising and people are going to stay scrolling social apps and finding cool products they want to buy. So I wouldn't be sure to advertising in this world. (upbeat music) Data centers need electricity, AI needs copper, reassuring needs steel and gold's run may tell you something about how the world is repricing money and debt. All of those point back to real assets. The RACS ETF is an actively managed one stop real assets shop from gold to commodities to natural resource equities adjusting his conditions change. 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Talk to us about the actual process of converting your catalog into something that an agent can actually read and how standardized that is at the moment and how standardized do you expect it to be in the future. And then also, if you're standardizing for machine readability, I feel like it's difficult to capture some of what might make a product interesting. It's difficult to code the actual vibes of a product, even with LLMs. I just find there's something difficult to capture. So talk to us about how you make it so that agents fully understand what is available to them. - Yeah, so there's two levels here. The first is just being known in the same way that you'd be known to humans. Because obviously all the LLMs have read the whole internet. That's what they're trained on. And they can do web searches. And so if you have good, product pages that are informative and layout the details of what the product does. If you've reviews, you know, if there's like a bunch of wire cutter reviews, things like that, you've probably seen this in research, searches where, you know, the AI app will say, you know, people love this product and they say XYZ, but they've read the whole internet. And so being known, you know, I'm a big deal on the internet helps with the AI apps as it does for humans. That's kind of step one. Step two and where Stripe gets more involved is you need a lot of the mechanical wiring up so that the AI's can do stuff that are more programmatic. And this is where our agent at commerce speech that we, you know, had an announcement about it. And this is what we're working on with Google and Microsoft and meta and, you know, open AI and all those folks to actually do some of the commerce wiring up. And there I say it's two things. One is you need a machine compatible way to get the very latest information about the product details. It's one thing for the AI to have in its training run maybe a year ago read the whole internet and know that this product is good. You need to be able to tell the AI is it's on sale. Whilst skews are in stock, which sizes we have right now and things like that. And so that kind of up to date, being able to make real time calls to the seller so that the AI has fresh, correct information that it can present. That's thing one. And then thing two is wiring up the agent to check out so the AI can actually buy us. And here you get into a bunch of boring like payments details. But for example, you don't want to be, you're not allowed to describe. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Is boring on out lots of. On the odd lots. Yes, those are the boring details. Those are the boring details. Yeah. So talk, start. Yeah, keep going. Start. Okay. So then for actually kind of handling a three way transaction where this you in chat GPT buying a product from this merchant or something like that, we're facilitating that transaction. And there you want to be, you know, and I'll be re-entering your payment details on each website at the same time you don't want to be flinging your payment details around across different websites. And so we've built all the wiring up and also don't forget a lot of websites have historically bots used to be a bad thing. They used to discriminate in bots. They would have bot protections and things like that. Whereas now it's like, okay, no, we actually want agents to be able to do this. And so you're unwinding some of the bot protections and having a little TSA pre for the bots that we work with, a way to kind of securely transfer one time use payment credential and things like this. There's a lot of wiring up beneath the season. Businesses have to do. This is actually maybe like a good spot to slightly segue over into the B2B element of agentic commerce. Because this gets to another thing that I think about, you know, I know one of the things that a valuable training data is literally just looking at user mouse behavior, right? Because then theoretically the AI model can go to a website and click the buttons just the way a human wants. But it all, it seems silly to me. Like ultimately, if we're building a human, we building websites for human use and then the bots can actually scrape them. Why not just actually build it for bots on the first place? What are we seeing there? What are you seeing from retailers where the fundamental experience? Is it going to be reshaped such that what we call the UX, the user experience is not really, the you is not the person, but the you is the bot. And is that changing how the internet is just going to look? So you're getting to a very core debate that's happening in AI right now, like some of these kind of questions at the frontier of AI as to where things go for practical purposes. But one of them is when you think about AI adoption for real world tasks, there's almost a race between maybe we make the world consumable by AI and we make the websites friendly for AI's to navigate and things like that. Or maybe just the AI's get good enough at unstructured computer use that you give them a desktop and you give them a mouse and a keyboard. And there's no backwards compatibility that we built, but they just end up figuring it out anyway. And it feels like over the next year or two or maybe three, this question will be resolved right now. A lot of people including us are working on making the stripe dashboard, merchant website, things like that, consumable by the a eyes. And what that means basically is text where the a eyes are very good at working with text. And so you need a textual interface for a bunch of things that previously might have been clicking around on a website. Sorry, just to be clear, this reminds me a little bit about the debate whether like apps in the app store should be skew morphing or not. But just to be clear, stripe is kind of taking a bet on the other side that actually the websites that look like their design for humans will not be the way to place your where to place your chips. Well, it's an option, right? Because the AI's got really good at computer use quickly. Then it's good. You know, then we have that answer. We've seen this a little bit when people get their open claw to go buy something and it's running on their Mac mini at home. The merchant might say, oh, but I don't have an agentic interface. It's like, well, we bought it anyway. The claw just went and did it and used a headless browser. And so you don't need to do anything to enable the computer use because the whole point is that it's fully backwards compatible with the current world. But in the meantime, I think people want to have these really powerful agentic experiences. It's a bit of a race, right? I think businesses correctly want to be the first ones to capture all this demand. Because I think it'd be the case if you start getting presented results in an AI app and it's like, okay, here are a bunch of options. This one you can just click buy now and it'll arrive in two days or this one you have to go to the website and click around. I think you start seeing some consumer preference for the ones that click one kind of like on Amazon when there's like a seller that has Amazon Prime in the third party sellers. You're way more likely to pick that and Amazon has done studies on this. You can imagine an analogous world within the AI apps where the businesses that support agentic commerce sooner outperform the ones that don't. Can you talk to us about how agentic commerce could impact prices? We all know that already when people are researching for products, you might put in a prompt saying like, find me the cheapest pair of, I don't know, sneakers that fit the following standard. You could imagine a world where lots and lots of consumers are being driven to the cheapest possible option for their needs and you could also imagine a world where maybe shops start to respond with more sophisticated price pack architecture, maybe dynamic pricing or something like that, which makes me wonder if the future is just going to be bots negotiating with each other over price endlessly. I think it's a bit, I mean, we can all speculate. I think it's a bit too early to have realized data there because when it's an early phenomenon, obviously, secondly, the leading edge of AI apps is quite high income, which is not necessarily representative of what the durable equilibrium will be. The one that we think about a lot is micro transactions are probably going to be now possible. And so you probably have this whole segment of commerce that previously wasn't over. Because micro transactions, they never work, they never have worked historically because of the mental load of deciding. For 40 cents each, because by the time you've decided, you might as well just have a day pass or a subscription or something like that. However, if Bloomberg, and actually I would love if Bloomberg had a proper API for their data, because if you want to do anything involving finance, when you're revived coding, it'd be really handy to have the Bloomberg data and the terminal is not exactly at the right interface for AI. But selling Bloomberg data by the SIP, so it's like, okay, we're doing a query about the straight of hormones. Let's pull in the Bloomberg data for that. And you pay whatever a small amount for that one little data request. That's a micro transaction that could actually happen. So that's the big effect that we think the time is finally there because the mental load has traditionally been too high for humans, but AI's love overthinking things. They love scrutinizing every decision. And so we might as well do that. This is something I've been thinking about as well. If micro transactions become frictionless, right? Do people try to monetize more and more content such that basically you're kind of paying a tax to browse the internet? By the way, John, I just want to let you know, I don't know if you know this, but Bloomberg has actually delegated some of these big strategic questions to me and Tracy. They've actually said, no, the podcasters should get to this. So we could actually talk about this. If you guys could put word in with Mike and the crew, I would like my coding agents to be able to talk to Bloomberg to data access that. We're messaging him right now. But no, there's actually once again, perfectly sags to my next question. One of the things I hear from, I've heard for years from my software developer friends. They use this binary free is in beer or free is in speech, right? So there's like software that you can download for free and that's, you know, that's free is in beer, but then free can also mean sort of like you can do anything you want with it free is in speech. I'm wondering on this point whether we need a third sort of one free is in roaming, free roaming because every piece of data is theoretically valuable to a model maker. And every interaction with a piece of data, which maybe is called metadata, that's all that interaction activity is also very valuable, et cetera. And I'm curious given that every interaction and any version of that is valuable, are we going to be at the end of the sort of free roaming internet or we, where we always just be paying these billionth of a cent micro transactions, which theoretically become doable and reasonable as we just sort of go along the internet, surf the web because this is all very valuable information that's theoretically being exposed. I don't think AI is causing the end of the free roaming internet because there's always been a lot of proprietary stuff, newspaper, paywalls. I don't remember a free roaming Bloomberg that I could read without paying, even the AI era. Subscribe to the channel, man! You can't afford it. - Just get the terminal. - Yeah, I feel like I have this. I know you really want our terminal. Anyway, sorry, keep going. - Yes, so there's always been a lot of proprietary stuff on the kind of consumer side where this content is only available behind a paywall. And then again, to the data point, this Bloomberg and FACTSAT and FMP and all these different providers. And so I think what all the providers are thinking about is how do I make this stuff available to the AI without just necessarily making it available for free. So what that looks like with the data owners is content licensing deals, right? Reddit now makes a lot of money from selling the Reddit data because you have all this like super interesting human discussion. You have the various media publishers either kind of suing or doing partnerships with or both the AI companies. We are very interested in data providers generally. Like we did a demo of sessions as to how you know you could do a financial research project with your coding agent buying the information it needs to put together the PDF answer. But we're quite early in that journey. But no, I think there's been lots of proprietary data for a long time. And so it's more about how do we open that up to AI agents? I'm not sure you'd see that much of a constriction on what's available on the free internet. - But just to push back on that a little bit, there's also been a lot of free stuff on the internet. And one of the reasons it's been free is because of traffic and advertising. And so if that's not going to get as much advertising or traffic anymore because everything is going through an LLM platform and people just aren't linking back directly, the temptation would be to try to make up that revenue by charging for the actual content. - Yeah, but that assumes that what the AI's want to browse and what the humans want to browse will be the same thing. And I'm not sure that'll necessarily be the case where there'll still be the case that say for media properties, that is aimed at human consumption. And so they'll do fine with the advertising revenue they had. Maybe they have some incremental revenue that they can get from the AI stuff. And then, I mean, maybe you're right, the really crummy aggregator pages where it's like top 10 lists, you know, you Google something and you get some SEO page and there's like a million tabula ads on it that you're trying to click through and the popover takes over your screen. Maybe those sites have a harder time, but I don't think anyone's going to really be too sad about that. But you've talked about this yourself. I think in a recent speech you gave, it's actually depressing to me because now thanks to the vibe coding apps, there's a bunch of stuff I would have liked to build, say around Twitter data, right? And there was an actual era in which a lot of these social platforms are very open with their APIs, et cetera. And now everything's sort of shut down. So you can't even really, unless I want to spend thousands of dollars, you couldn't really build like an app that does something with someone's Twitter account, et cetera. And I think you talked about this in your recent speech, doesn't this further accelerate the move of everyone to just sort of clamp down and allow people to roam their site and slurp up data? Yes, but just to clarify, the human roaming has, you know, you can still browse Reddit for free. You can still browse Twitter for free. What they're clamping down on in some cases is AI training scraping where they want to put a tool on that. And maybe they didn't kind of intend for all that information to be kind of freely available to the AI apps. And there you can argue whether that should be freely available to open AI in Google and everyone like that or they should have to pay for it. But it's not the case that are very important intellectual commonses of Reddit and X and all the other silence that we like to frequent our go away for us as you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] A lot of short, daily news podcast focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On up first from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes. Because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the up first podcast from NPR. You know, you talk about micro transactions. And people have been talking about micro transactions for literally decades, probably. And the example you gave, oh, why can't we just buy an article for $0.50? I think there's various reasons why that never took off. But one aspect is just the cost of a transaction. And with theoretically, particularly with stablecoins, you could have almost free transactions. Are you seeing actual use of stablecoins in sort of B to B transactions? Because the sheer cost is so low. Where do stablecoins come into this? Yeah, you're right, though. When you have this pay by the SIP model, you obviously just can economically speaking have kind of an individual card transaction per usage. And by the way, this is the economic model of the AI economy. Because you have marginal cost for each token. And so no one really offers an all you can eat plan. You can subscribe to chat, GPT or cloud, or something like that. And you'll have a plan and you'll eventually hit usage limits. Or you can pay on an API basis. And you'll top up with some amount of credits and then burn down the tokens. But everyone charges per usage at some level. And so then what do you do? And the commonwealth, which we power a lot of is this usage based billing. We actually bought a company called Metronome to power that. Where you track credits, right? And so that kind of telco billing, you have your card on file, and then you track credits. We are quite excited about what you're referencing, which is stablecoins for this. You're asking kind of how much are we seeing about it right now? Not that much yet, but we're building out all the infrastructure for us. The place where I think stablecoins could be really exciting is you don't have to then go have a relationship with all these services. And so if you want to vibe code a little website, and you're like, OK, I'm going to buy the domain from Cloudflare and Hostunversel and all these things. You've had the experience of you have to go and sign up for all these services and do these things. And we think that experience of signing up for all these services should go away. And so we are making it where you don't need to do that. And paying by a stablecoins could be one way where you pay per web requester, per individual use, very small amounts. And you don't have to go sign up for a whole bunch of different services. So I realized that Adeptic Commerce is a spectrum of services. Everything from just simply filling out a form to giving an agent a certain amount of wallet spend and saying go off and figure out my life for me and spend the following on whatever. Everyone also likes to talk about bots going wild, right? And going rogue. And so I imagine if you are giving an agent a certain amount of money and telling it to spend in a certain way, instruction, specificity can vary. But what happens if things go bad or what happens if you're simply dissatisfied with the choice that the agent makes? Whose fault is that like where does the liability actually lie? I think this concern is quite overstated. Because one, the agents can do a huge amount of useful work for you while they're still a human in the loop. And so imagine if Claude code asks you, are you OK if I spend this amount and you just have to hit Enter? That's much better than the experience of signing up for a service and clicking around the web face and things like that. So you've still saved a huge amount of time, even if you're reviewing the transaction. Similarly, again, the consumer use case the way we suggest people visualize the agent to commerce is you still have a human in the loop deciding, making the final decision of both what thing I buy and am I OK spending this much money? But the AI can still be hugely beneficial as part of your shopping journey, even if you're as a human signing off on that transaction. And then you get a bit into delegated authority. It's kind of like we run a Striper large company and we spend billions of dollars a year and there's lots of delegated authority. You might say, what if you have one crazy person who makes a bad spending decision? And we occasionally have that. And you solve it. It's like, I don't know, give people spending limits on how much they can spend and you whack them on the knuckles if they do something really crazy and you just solve it with sensible limits in delegated authority and approval process. And it's kind of the same with an agent. Well, this gets me to a question I wanted to ask about running a big company in the age of AI. Things are changing insanely fast. Fast, fast, fast. Things are changing. I'm sorry. Things are changing extremely fast. And there are certain things that people were excited about last year that didn't fizzle out. And they say we are certain things that people got really excited about even in December 2025 that became the next hot thing. For Stripe specifically or for a company, how do you think about say like, OK, here is a thing that we want to exploit. Here is a moment. And we want to take advantage of it. And we're going to build the thing for this moment. Versus we want to allocate resources for anticipating what's going to be the thing 24 months from now, explore where this is going. How do you think about the sort of resource allocation between exploring and exploiting in such a fast moving environment from the corporate standpoint? I would say you need to be very flexible, because as you were saying, if your information is three months out of date or six months out of date, it just will flee old. And so we tried to be pretty flexible. And I know there's AI somehow brings out a desire for thought leadership in people. Yes. Oh my god. I'm very grandparents. But yeah. And just I don't know. Like we have more questions and answers. And we're trying to figure it out as we go through. So that's one is kind of having the right level of humility. The second thing is you kind of need have to similarly the right level of AI psychosis that the dose makes the poison, where you need to really believe in the capabilities of the models, but you also have to be willing to reason about the limits. And so to give you an example, really amazing at writing codes and huge productivity uplift there. If you try to do anything, I know if you guys have tried to do anything like a financial analysis with the models, they're just horrible at numbers, enumerous. And they kind of fool you because they can put together something that they can build a really nice spreadsheet, but the number is just go completely wrong halfway through the spreadsheet. Oh great point, you're absolutely right. And so you need to have kind of a bit of a fingertip sense for what the models are good at versus bad at. I kind of think of this in you split up the company, and traditionally, you know, this R&D go to Marcus and GNA. And if you think about the different domains, they work quite differently. Within engineering, engineers have always been passionate about tools and better tools. And any kind of a half self-respecting engineer is very eagerly adopting AI. You don't get too many lagers. And so we have seen a huge amount of adoption within the software engineering at Stripe. That's going really quickly. I don't think we're at the end of stage, but we're pretty like that machine, I would say, is pretty well set up to be in this self-improving loop because the people who are kind of doing the engineering day in day out also think about how can I better automate this process? How can I use AI to make it work faster? And so a lot of bugs that are fixed at Stripe, no one ever opens an editor for them. They just hit the fix this bug button in the interface. And that's an agentically. So that's self-transitioning. On sales and kind of go to Marcus, what helps you is that it is the most measurable domain inside of tech companies and companies broadly. And so you can reason about the specific productivity of a specific sales person in a way that you can't with a software engineer or a lawyer or something where any kind of metrics there is very subject to good-hards law, whereas with good market, it's measurable. And so we have seen at Stripe at least our sellers are super into AI. They're adopting it very eagerly. And you can't ascribe causality in the productivity numbers, but the productivity numbers are very good. The pace where I think it's trickiest is within the other general functions, you think about legal and finance and risk and things like that. And there is a lot of AI happening, but it's just tricky because one, there's a huge amount of infrastructure work that needs to happen. It's like, okay, we actually have to get this financial data into a form where it's usable by the AI's and we used to keep it under lock and key. And now we need to kind of load it in a way that the AI can use. So we had a big infrastructure build at Stripe to make the data usable to the AI's, but also kind of keep it locked down appropriately and things like that. And then like I said, the AI's are just uneven in which domains they are good at. And so if it is a coding problem or if it could be turned into a coding problem, very good at that. The public tax code and the public legal code, they're very good at that because it's text that they've been trained on. But working with, I would say, specific financial data at Stripe or kind of specific internal stuff that we have, that's just kind of harder to get good results out. It's not impossible and the models will improve a lot, but I would say that is kind of the trickiest domain to get great results. So just going back to the beginning of this conversation, we talked about how the internet basically runs on commerce and if the nature of that commerce is changing, you would expect some impact on the internet. We've been asking you various questions about that, but I'm just going to ask you very directly, what is your sort of broad vision of the internet in the world of agentech commerce? We're very excited for the intelligence explosion. And so in our pockets of the internet, we are seeing much more entrepreneurship happening. That shows up in the numbers. So to give you a sense, new business creation on Stripe in Q1 was up 71% year over year. That's, business generally is not growing that quickly. It's like the leading edge numbers are seeing much more business creation. You see this in other numbers too. So the app store number of app launches was quite flat for many, many years and now it's seeing similar growth to that. And so there are going to be many, many fruits of the intelligence explosion. But we get quite excited about the idea that you have more people creating companies and maybe you get more dynamism. We talked about some of the effects where you'll maybe see more price competition. If you work at a big company and you think, Hey, the way we are doing this is really silly. I could do it so much better. The bar to you being able to quit the company and develop a competing better offering is now lower because you have more power available to you. You can recruit the intelligence that's available to you. And so our prediction is that you guess more economic dynamism, which we're already seeing in our leading edge numbers. And we're seeing more startup formation. But we talked about this at Stripe Sessions, you know, kind of an Ecosian sense. Maybe you see smaller firms and more of them because it's easier for them to coordinate each other. John, I have like a million more questions for you, but I'm aware of the time. So let's just leave it there. This was such a treat. Really enjoyed getting the chance to talk and we'd love to have you back sometime. Absolutely. We love it. Tracy, I really thought that conversation was super interesting. I mean, just to start, there is a lot here. This is a big deal. I think we were just going to go the question of whether just commerce directly and then also your question of the internet more broadly. There's some pretty big questions and big implications from which way some of this stuff unfolds. Yeah. And I'm glad that John appreciates the enjoyable ability of scrolling. Yeah. Well, yes, absolutely. I do have questions about, I guess, discoverability when it comes to age. So everyone by now knows the example of you go on Netflix. The first video or movie TV series you ever watched is incredibly important because the algorithms sort of builds itself around that one choice. And if you watch something stupid, then forever and ever, it's going to like, yeah, yeah, has this one demographic. So there is a tendency for alga's to sort of cluster among like recognizable patterns. So it becomes harder to discover new things, new products. I will say some alga's obviously do it better than others. YouTube's algorithm, I find it like actually really phenomenal for resurfacing or for surfacing new things. Well, within LLMs, it's all I find memory to be a very double-edged sword, which is on some level. I do think it's more useful when it knows a little bit about the context of the user. But it's time for shoehorn. Yeah. Like you did a query six months ago and we'll try to bring it back around to that. I think there's a lot there. I think there's a lot there with the future of advertising. Yeah. Just setting aside, what is the equivalent of SEO in the LLM? We should probably do an episode from the perspective of retailers that are really having to think about how they surface within totally. So that that in itself is a huge shift. If you're a retailer and now you're trying to target bots as well as humans. And then the overall question of what happens to the internet in this new world. I tend to be very cynical about the overall direction of the internet and just assume that every new advance in technology is going to make it worse. But you could see a future where the ability to do seamless micro transactions basically means that everyone starts charging for their content for their APIs. And so you actually have to pay a fee to be on the internet. This is what I mean. The end of free is in the long run. I think is an interesting question. I also just personally, I find it very validating that like I'm not crazy that actually like being able to do something to do like buying a domain name is something that people other people thought needed to be solved. You know what I'm saying? So like some of these things seem very specific that stripe announced in the last couple of weeks related to both the domain name question. They're related to being able to pay an API directly rather than go to a website and enter your credit card and stuff like that for credit or whatever. I found the issues to be very annoying and big deals. And I'm sort of glad that I feel less crazy like actually these are annoying things within the new contemporary landscape. Absolutely. And speaking of annoying things, I also feel like a big chunk of the future is going to be bots just like negotiating with each other. And I've already heard in the insurance sphere, you know, you've heard of insurers using AI to like bulk deny claims, right? And then I've heard of new AI startups or existing companies using AI to contest the insurers push back. And so it just feels like it's just going to be bots like. The only money makers are going to be chip companies in Korea because there everyone's going to be having to get more powerful chips and old boomer landlords and so on because the employees of open AI and anthropic need a place to live and healthcare. Yeah. All right. So we leave it there. Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alley. You can follow me at Tracy Alley. And I'm Joe Wyzen. Thought you could follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest, John Callison. He's at collision. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Irman. Dash will benefit a dash bot. Kale Brooks. It Kale Brooks and Kevin Luzano at Kevin Lloyd. Luzano. And for more AdLots content, go to bloomberg.com/adLots for the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our discord discord.gg/adLots. And if you enjoy AdLots, if you like it when we talk about the future of the internet, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of of our episodes absolutely add free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening! I'm Francine Lacqua, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast. Leaders was Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment, but I've always been curious who are these people as leaders. I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. 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