Stripe president: checkout pages 'will go away' as AI buys for you

Checkout pages are on their way out, in the view of Stripe's president of technology and business. Will Gaybrick said shoppers will soon tell an AI agent to buy an item directly from a product display page, skipping the form-filling step entirely.

"It's been very easy to get through a checkout page these days, 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," Gaybrick said during a recent episode of the "A16z Show."

He acknowledged there are still "open questions" about what agentic commerce will look like. Even a "less ambitious form" of the technology will spell the end of checkout pages, he said.

"We think machines will want to buy from other machines," Gaybrick said. "And there's really a question of what should checkout look like for agents?"

Stripe is building the rails for that shift. Gaybrick pointed to the company's Link quick-pay tool and Shopify's Shop Pay as early versions of friction-free purchasing. Internally, he said Stripe has moved from being "a payments company with sort of add-ons to now being this multi-product platform."

The speed of the transition is the open variable. Agentic AI goes a step beyond chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT: it is designed to make proactive decisions with minimal human direction. In a shopping context, that means users hand over some purchasing authority to the software.

Trust remains the sticking point. In June, Austin-based e-commerce firm Commerce and PayPal published a survey of online shoppers in the US, UK and Australia showing consumers were still hesitant to let AI buy without approval.

"Consumers want the time and money savings that agentic commerce can deliver, 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.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison is more emphatic. "All the commerce is going agentic," he said during a live interview on TBPN in April. "People will still be doing stuff, they will do it through their agent."

Collison described negotiating with ChatGPT over a bike case before concluding: "At the end of that, you just want to be able to hit buy rather than like no one wants to fill out web forms. It's not a value-add activity."

The conviction runs deep at Stripe. Collison, his brother John, Stripe's president, and Gaybrick told investors in a letter, obtained by Axios, that the singularity, the moment where AI surpasses human intelligence, arrived in January. They cited "a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation" as evidence of an inflection in long-run trends.

"The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously," the trio wrote.