As agentic commerce evolves, Stripe and other payment players anticipate a gradual process for this evolution.
Today, you’re explaining to an AI bot what kind of yoga gear your sister likes and evaluating the options it finds before you handle the payment. But one day, this search-review-pay process will likely happen without you for your sister to receive a gift.
“Like much in AI, agentic commerce suffers from having been overhyped too early in some corners,” Stripe’s co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, wrote Tuesday in their annual letter, which touched on their views of how agentic shopping will expand gradually across the digital retail world.
“People paint a utopian picture of autonomous agents planning and executing all your commerce by knowing your every whim.”
Instead, they wrote, agentic commerce is likely to morph in “small chunks.”
They categorized these chunks as five levels, layered from the current rudimentary options to a future fifth stage at which an agent – fully aware of your shopping needs and budget – operates without direction. In the Collisons’ ultimate “futuristic vision” example, a child’s back-to-school supplies are purchased and delivered based on the calendar and past budgets.
The second level is more descriptive, telling an agent about a situation for a purchase, as opposed to providing specific attributes, according to the letter. “Today, the industry is hovering on the edge of levels 1 and 2,” the Collisons wrote.
The financial potential is large, according to analyst forecasts.
About 81% of consumers are inclined to use agentic commerce tools, potentially affecting $1.3 trillion of spending, according to a survey of 2,532 people last year by Boston Consulting Group. An October McKinsey report on agentic commerce pegged the retail sales opportunity as high as $1 trillion for goods in the U.S. by 2030, and up to $5 trillion globally, not including spending on services.
The same measured approach to agentic commerce is shared by a Stripe-funded startup, Circuit & Chisel, which says it’s “building the foundational technologies that will enable agentic payments and movement around the web.”
The company raised $19.2 million in September to launch ATXP, an agent transaction protocol, to help AI agents navigate the internet and complete transactions, connecting AI and commerce with fewer glitches.
Circuit & Chisel was co-founded by two former Stripe executives – CEO Louis Amira, who was formerly head of crypto and AI partnerships at the larger payments company. David Noel-Romas, who was Stripe’s head of crypto engineering, is Circuit & Chisel’s chief technology officer. They left Stripe last year.
“Agents are very likely our target customer moving forwards, which is a thing that got me laughed out of some rooms a year ago, and now sounds way more plausible for a lot more people,” Amira said Monday in an interview.
The New York-based company hopes to become the critical source of tools agentic bots need to improve their function, regardless of whether an agent is from Amazon, Apple, Google or some other provider, Amira said
“We expect all of them to fight like hell to be the agent that you think about,” he said. “We want Siri or Nigel or Alexa or whatever, to reach for our tools in order to be able to go make things work,” he said, referring to branded AI assistants.
To that end, Circuit & Chisel offers agents email addresses, and is working to provision memory, access to images and payments options as part of its queries to some of the agents now online. “We’re going to keep seeing what they request and just keep adding those things over time,” Amira said.
Amid all the current churn within the AI world, including the various agentic protocols from massive companies like Stripe, Google and OpenAI, the final forms of how agentic commerce will work is still too early to call, Amira said.
“We’re reminded of those few years in the mid-90s when the structure of the internet we use today was hashed out,” the Stripe co-founders wrote Tuesday, noting the different protocols and providers proffering various approaches.
Said Amira: “Nobody’s really willing to place massive bets on any of this stuff at this point, because it’s just so unclear.”
