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

22:55Tracy Alloway:This is actually maybe like a good spot to slightly seg over into the B2B element of agentic commerce. Because this gets to another thing that I think about. I know one of the things that available 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 seems silly to me. Ultimately, if we're building websites for human use and then a bot's going to actually scrape them, why not just actually build it for bots in 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.

23:46Tracy Alloway: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 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 AIs to navigate and things like that. Or maybe just the AIs 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.

24:29And 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 AIs. And what that means basically is text, where the AIs 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.

24:56Tracy Alloway:but maybe sorry just to be clear this reminds me a little bit about the debate whether like apps in the app store should be skeuomorphic 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 they're designed for humans will not be the way to place your where to place your chips well it's an option right because if the ais get really good at computer use quickly then it's good you know then we have that answer and you're 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 world 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.

25:53Because 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 and blah, blah, blah, blah. I think you'll 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.

26:26Can you talk to us about how agentic commerce could impact prices? And 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. And so 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.

27:06I 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 one, 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 microtransactions are probably going to be now possible. And so you probably have this whole segment of commerce that previously wasn't open. Because microtransactions, they never work or never have worked historically because of the kind of mental load of deciding.

27:42There's no point at selling Bloomberg articles for, you know, 40 cents each, because by the time you've decided, you might as well just have bought 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 vibe coding, it'd be really handy to have the Bloomberg data and the terminal is not exactly the right interface for AI. But selling Bloomberg data by the SIP, so it's like, okay, we're doing a query about the Strait of Hormuz, let's pull in the Bloomberg data for that.

28:12and you pay whatever small amount for that one little data request, that's a microtransaction 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 AIs love overthinking things. They love scrutinizing every little decision, and so we might as well do that. This is something I've been thinking about as well. If microtransactions 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?

28:40Tracy Alloway: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. So they've actually said, no, the podcasters should get to decide. So we could actually talk about this. If you guys could put word in with Mike and the crew that just I would like my coding agents to be able to talk to Bloomberg to do data analysis, that would be helpful. We're messaging him right now. But no, this actually, once again, perfectly segs 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 as in beer or free as in speech, right?

29:17Tracy Alloway:So there's like software that you can download for free and that's, you know, that's free as in beer. But then free can also mean sort of like you can do anything you want with it. Free as in speech. I'm wondering on this point whether we need a third sort of one, free as 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 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?

29:53Tracy Alloway:Or were we always just be paying these billionth of a cent microtransactions, 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 pre the AI era. Get the subscription, man. You can import. I actually do pay. Get the terminal. Okay, sorry. Yes. I feel like half of this, I know you really want our terminal.

30:36Tracy Alloway:Anyway, sorry, keep going. Yes. So there's always been a lot of proprietary stuff on the kind of consumer side where, you know, this content is only available behind a paywall. And then again, to the data point, there's Bloomberg and FactSet and FMP and, you know, 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? And 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.

31:09You 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 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.

31:45Yeah. 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 AIs 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 it'll still be the case, let's say for media properties, that is aimed at human consumption.

32:24And 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 that the really crummy aggregator pages where it's like top 10 lists, 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.

32:53Tracy Alloway: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, etc. And now everything's sort of shut down. So you can't even really, you know, unless I want to spend thousands of dollars. You couldn't really build like an app that does something with someone's Twitter account, etc. And I think you talked about this in your recent speech.

33:24Tracy Alloway: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 toll 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 OpenAI and Google and everyone like that or they should have to pay for it but it's not the case that our very important intellectual commonses of Reddit and X and all the other asylums that we like to frequent are going away for us as humans.

34:26Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts. I, um, I can't stop scratching my downtown. Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown. Some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI. Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24-7. Healthcare just got less painful. Financial growth begins long before the first investment. It comes from understanding what you're building toward, what's at stake, and what success looks like for you. At Oppenheimer, we bring bold thinking guided by the full strength of our expertise to put capital to work building and protecting wealth that lasts generations.

35:18Put the power of Oppenheimer thinking to work for you. Wealth Management. Capital Markets. Investment Banking. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20 % year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S &P 500.

35:57Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice.

36:25Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

36:28Tracy Alloway:You know, you talk about microtransactions and people have been talking about microtransactions for literally decades, probably. And the example you gave, oh, why can't we just buy an article for 50 cents? 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 like stable coins, you could have almost free transactions. Are you seeing actual use of stable coins in sort of B2B transactions because the sheer cost is so low? Like where do stable coins come into this? You're right that when you have this pay by the SIP model, you obviously just can't, economically speaking, have kind of an individual card transaction per usage.

37:15per usage. And by the way, this is the economic model of the AI economy because you have marginal costs for each token. And so no one really offers an all you can eat plan. You can subscribe to chat GPT or Claude 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 kind of common mode, which we power a lot of is kind of this usage-based billing. We actually bought a company called Metronome to power that, where you track credits, right?

37:54And 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 stable coins for this. You're asking kind of how much are we seeing of it right now. Not that much yet, but we're building out all the infrastructure for it. 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, okay, I'm going to buy the domain from Cloudflare and host on Vercel and all these things, you know, you've had the experience of you have to go and sign up for all these services and do these things.

38:29And 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 via stable coins could be one way where you pay per web request or 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 Ajected 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.

39:07And 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.

39:50So you've still saved a huge amount of time, even if you're kind of reviewing the transaction. Similarly, again, the consumer use case, the way we suggest people visualize agentic commerce is you still have a human in the loop deciding, making the final decision of both what thing I buy and am I okay spending this much money? But the AIs 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, you know, we run a, you know, at Stripe, a 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?

40:25And we occasionally have that. And, you know, how do you solve it? It's like, I don't know, give people spending limits on how much they can spend and you, you know, whack them on the knuckles if they do something really crazy. And you just solve it with kind of sensible limits and delegated authority and approval process. It's kind of the same with an agent.

40:41Tracy Alloway: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 fastly. Fast. Fastly? 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 in the same way or 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 saying like, okay, 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.

41:29Tracy Alloway: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's just woefully old. And so we tried to be pretty flexible. And I don't know, AI somehow brings out a desire for thought leadership in people. Yes, oh my God, very grand pronouncements. Yeah, and just, I don't know, like we have more questions than answers and we're trying to figure it out as we go through.

42:02So that's one is kind of having the right level of humility. The second thing is you kind of need to have the, 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 don't know if you guys have tried to do anything like a financial analysis with the models, they're just horrible at numbers, innumerous. And they kind of fool you because they can put together something that they can build a really nice spreadsheet.

42:37But you're like, but the numbers 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 into the traditional, you know, there's R &D, go-to-market and G &A. 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 laggards.

43:11And so we have seen a huge amount of adoption within software engineering at Stripe. That's going really quickly. I don't think we're at the end state, 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 done agentically. So that's software engineering.

43:43On sales and kind of go to market, 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 salesperson in a way that you You can't with a software engineer or a lawyer or something where any kind of metric there is very subject to Goodhart's law. Whereas with go-to-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.

44:18The place 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, 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 AIs 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 AIs, but also kind of keep it locked down appropriately and things like that.

44:50And then, like I said, the AIs 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 techs 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.

45:25And 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 agentic commerce? We're very excited for the intelligence explosion. And so in our pocket 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 business generally is not growing that quickly. It's like the leading edge numbers are seeing much more business creation.

46:09You see this in other numbers too. So the app store, like number of app launches was quite flat for many, many years. And now it's seeing kind of 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, right? 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.

46:52You can recruit the intelligence that's available to you. And so our prediction is that you get more economic dynamism, which we're already seeing in our leading edge numbers. You know, we're seeing more startup formation. But we talked about this at Stripe Sessions, you know, kind of in a Kosian sense, maybe you see smaller firms and more of them because it's easier for them to coordinate with each other.

47:14Tracy Alloway: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 would love to have you back sometime. Absolutely, we'd love it.

47:38Tracy Alloway: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 where it's 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 pretty big implications from which way some of this stuff unfolds. Yeah. And I'm glad that John appreciates the enjoyability of scrolling. The human in the loop. Yeah. Well, yes, absolutely. I do have questions about, I guess, discoverability when it comes to agents. So everyone by now knows the example of you go on Netflix, the first video or movie TV series you ever watch is incredibly important because the algorithm sort of builds itself around that one choice.

48:23And if you watch something stupid, then forever and ever it's going to pinpoint you as this one demographic. So there is a tendency for algos to sort of cluster among recognizable patterns. So it becomes harder to discover new things, new products. I will say some algos obviously do it better than others. YouTube's algorithm I find actually really phenomenal for resurfacing new things.

48:49Tracy Alloway:Well, within LLMs itself, 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. Yeah. But there'll be times when it'll shoehorn any, like you did a query six months ago and it'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. 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.

49:21So 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, like 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 like you could see a future where the ability to do seamless microtransactions basically means that like everyone starts charging for their content, for their APIs. And so you actually have to pay a fee to be on the internet.

49:55Tracy Alloway:This is what I mean. Like the end of free isn't roaming, 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 at a dome, 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 that 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 credits or whatever.

50:30Tracy Alloway:I found these things to be very annoying and big deals. And I'm sort of glad that I feel that's 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 pushback. And so it just feels like it's just going to be bots.

51:06Tracy Alloway:The only money makers are going to be chip companies in Korea because everyone's going to be having to get more powerful chips and old boomer landlords in San Francisco because the employees of OpenAI and Anthropoc need a place to live. And healthcare. Yeah. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, John Collison. He's at Collision. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Ehrman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano.

51:45Tracy Alloway:And for more Odd Thoughts content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Thoughts for the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Oddlots, 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 our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

52:46You ever wonder how far an EV can take you on one charge? Well, most people drive about 40 miles a day, which means you can do all daily stuff no problem. Go to work, grab the kids at school, get the groceries, and still have enough charge to visit your in-laws in the next county. But they don't need to know that. And the best part, you won't have to buy gas at all. The way forward is electric.

53:11Tracy Alloway:Explore EVs that fit your life at electricforall.org. Picture this. You're on the boardwalk with your best friends. The waves are rolling. The band is playing. And doom scrolling feels like a distant memory. This is when it hits you. That Myrtle moment. It's the second everything clicks when you realize Myrtle Beach is more than a getaway. It's right where you belong. Don't just daydream about it. Find your own Myrtle moment at visitmyrtlebeach.com.

54:12Visit pacor.com slash leaders and go from workflow to workflow. That's pacor.com slash leaders.