Global payments giant Stripe has showcased artificial intelligence tools designed to automate business purchases, with its leaders imagining systems capable of making the traditional e-commerce experience obsolete.

Global payments giant Stripe has showcased artificial intelligence tools designed to automate business purchases, with its leaders imagining systems capable of making the traditional e-commerce experience obsolete.

Overnight in San Francisco, Stripe highlighted a suite of 60 new products and updates, including an upcoming agentic payment system capable of making online purchases on behalf of users.

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“LLMs are phenomenal at getting to the point of purchase, but they’re not built to navigate complex checkout forms, securely stored payment credentials, handling payment authentication, and so on,” said Stripe’s president of product and business William Gaybrick.

“Today we’re beginning to solve that, with a brand new API that lets anyone create a commerce agent in just a few seconds.”

In one live demonstration, Gaybrick deployed an AI agent that bought a book through an online webstore with minimal instruction.

Later, Gaybrick tasked an agent with purchasing each item recommended by a skincare blog, removing the need to click each third-party link and process every purchase manually.

The second live demo stumbled, with Gaybrick later blaming an external SMS provider for the technical difficulties.

Speaking after the Stripe Sessions demonstration, Stripe co-founder John Collison told SmartCompany agentic systems could overhaul how businesses transact online.

Those purchasing tools are “going to be the new table stakes for product experience, that you can simply explain intent and then the right thing just happens,” he said.

Gaybrick said those developer tools, capable of making purchases with parameters set by the user, are coming “very soon”.

Looking beyond the existing website layer, Gaybrick and Collison told reporters that emerging AI tools could ultimately change the way e-commerce websites look and operate.

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“There’s an open question of: ‘What are websites for agents?’” said Gaybrick, who argued buyer agents don’t need a traditional e-commerce website interface to make a purchase.

“We can do so much better.

“Right now your storefront is a static, unmanned property, whereas you can actually have a seller agent right there”, capable of negotiating with an automated buyer.

“It’s kind of funny, because we’re retrofitting agent to commerce onto the web,” said Collison.

“I don’t think we would claim that this is the last word in agentic commerce or anything like that,” he added.

“This is our first salvo, and there’s going to be an incredibly fast moving industry and product evolution over the coming 10 years, as everything moves to agentic.

“And we’re going to be on the forefront, but this is the starting gun anyway.”

Stripe says its broader agent toolkit supports OpenAI Agents SDK, Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, and CrewAI.

Beyond its new purchasing agent, Stripe unveiled what it describes as the first-ever AI foundation model for payment data.

Stripe claims the model, which was trained on data from tens of billions of transactions, is already reducing the incidence of ‘card testing’ fraud perpetrated against its large business users.

The model will help businesses boost payment authorisation rates and assist with payment disputes, said Emily Glassberg Sands, Stripe’s head of information on AI.

The announcements were backdropped by Stripe’s new commitment to stablecoins, with the company promising to deliver USDC-denominated corporate cards through the Visa payment network.

That card offering is not yet available in Australia, where the federal government is still finalising its regulatory approach to stablecoins and other digital assets.

Author Credits- David Adams, Smart Company