Stripe president says checkout pages ‘will go away’ as AI commerce expands

Stripe president, technology and business, Will Gaybrick Cody Glenn/Sportsfile via Getty Images Stripe president Will Gaybrick said checkout pages "will just go away." Gaybrick said one step for agentic AI commerce will be a more seamless checkout process.

Overall, Stripe is bullish about what AI can mean for online shopping.

AI agents are poised to radically reshape how we buy stuff online, a top Stripe executive predicts.

"It's been very easy to get through a checkout page these days, but should you even need to go to one, or should you just be able to say buy it on a product display page? I think so," Will Gaybrick , Stripe president, technology and business, said during a recent episode of the "A16z Show." There are still "open questions" about what agentic commerce will look like exactly, Gaybrick said.

He said even a "less ambitious form" of agentic commerce will be the end of checkout pages.

"We think machines will want to buy from other machines," he said.

"And there's really a question of what should checkout look like for agents?" Gaybrick said there hasn't yet been a breakout moment for agentic commerce, but Stripe is laying the foundation for such advancements.

He pointed to Stripe's "Link" and Shopify's "Shop Pay," both of which are quick-pay tools that already streamline the checkout process.

Gaybrick said internally, Stripe has shifted its view "from being a payments company with sort of add-ons to now being this multi-product platform." Less clear is how quickly this change may occur.

Agentic AI is still relatively new and is an additional step beyond chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

By design, agentic AI is supposed to make proactive decisions with only minimal human direction, though the leash users give AI tools can be adjusted.

In the context of shopping, it means users would have to entrust AI with some purchasing authority.

In June, Commerce, an Austin-based e-commerce company, and PayPal said that a survey of online shoppers in the US, UK, and Australia found that consumers were still hesitant to trust AI to buy without approval.

"Consumers want the time and money savings that agentic commerce can deliver, but they aren't ready to trust agents as an autonomous buyer," Sharon Gee, senior vice president of AI for products at Commerce, said in a statement.