AI is disrupting many ways of doing things, and shopping on the internet might just be another of them.
The way we buy goods and services online, a process largely unchanged for two decades, could be on the cusp of a radical transformation. John Collison, co-founder and President of Stripe, the global financial payments platform, recently shared his vision for this shift. Speaking about Stripe’s product roadmap, Collison highlighted a move away from traditional web browser-based e-commerce towards “agentic buying” conducted directly within AI systems. This future, he suggests, will be powered by AI agents capable of understanding our needs and executing purchases on our behalf.
Collison laid out how this evolution is already influencing Stripe’s strategy:
“It’s also powering our product roadmap. We just discussed a little bit of it already with the first payment foundation model, but we’re also seeing things where we launched a toolkit for agentic buying. What that means is that right now, all buying happens in this web browser modality. Someone sends you a link, you click into a website, you fill out your details in the web browser, and then you eventually hit buy. That’s how all internet payments happen.”
He then contrasted this with the emerging capabilities of AI tools:
“But if you think about your workflows right now, you probably have a preferred AI tool – maybe you use ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity, or something like this – and you’re doing a lot of stuff there. Maybe previously you searched for information, and now you just ask your AI assistant for it. The next frontier is actually going to be commerce taking place inside these applications.”
Collison elaborated on the technology enabling this shift and Stripe’s proactive steps: “The term you’re going to hear a lot more of going forward is MCP – that’s the buzzword in Silicon Valley right now – where it’s enabling AI tools to actually interact with and manipulate the real world. So it’s not just understanding information out there on the web, but it’s actually doing things and understanding how to make a purchase or something like that. We launched a toolkit for agentic buying – the first, as far as we know. This means that you can do something inside your favorite AI tool – ChatGPT just announced that you can do buying directly from ChatGPT – and we’re going to see much more of that kind of activity.”
Looking ahead, Collison predicted a significant platform change, while also managing expectations about its immediacy: “The big change that we see is that right now, everything is constructed around making a web purchase modality, and there’s a pretty significant platform shift on the horizon. Again, it hasn’t happened yet – we don’t want to overhype it – but we predict that in the future, a lot of commerce will take place directly within the AI tools that people are using. It’s kind of funny when you think about it, that an AI can do everything for you; it can go off and deeply research an entire thing for you, but then to actually do the steps, you need to come along and manually enter details yourself. That is clearly not going to persist. And so we are certainly, and all the businesses coming to Stripe Sessions are, gearing up for this agent of commerce future.”
Collison’s vision taps into a rapidly evolving technological landscape. AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini are becoming increasingly sophisticated, capable not just of understanding and generating text, but also of performing actions. Imagine instructing your AI assistant: “Find me the best noise-cancelling headphones under $300, compare the top three, and order the one with the longest battery life using my stored payment details.” This seamless, conversational commerce is what Collison terms “agentic buying.”
For consumers, this shift promises unprecedented convenience. The tedious process of navigating multiple websites, comparing products, and repeatedly entering shipping and payment information could be replaced by a simple directive to a trusted AI. Personalization could also reach new heights, with AI agents learning individual preferences and making proactive, highly relevant purchasing suggestions. There could, of course, be security implications to letting agents transact on our behalf, but financial services firms seem to be looking into it — Visa has said it’ll launch a special card for AI agents to let them make purchases on the internet. And with Stripe too saying that e-commerce will move to AI systems, the long-established model of shopping on the internet through browsers might soon get an upgrade.