In an interview with Bloomberg News’ Odd Lots podcast released Saturday (May 16), Collison described agentic commerce as an extension of earlier efforts to reduce eCommerce friction.
“When you find the product at the very end, do you really then want to go and be filling out all these web form fields and things like that?” asked Collinson whose company debuted its own agentic commerce offering last year. “Or do you want to just say, ‘Yeah, that sounds good, buy it for me in this size’?”
He argued people will want the low friction option, and that the history of technology shows that lower-friction options tend to succeed.
“And so we think that clearly will happen and is happening to some degree already,” said Collison, who founded Stripe with his brother, CEO Patrick Collison.
Collison added that he distinguishes between mundane tasks that AI agents should handle (like purchasing recipe ingredients or travel adapters) and “fun” activities that humans want to keep, such as scrolling through online clothing selections or planning a vacation.
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In general, Collison said, people don’t want robots to take over their “scrolling jobs.” He also touched on the idea that traditional keyword search is outdated for complex shopping like furniture or clothing.
“It’s ridiculous that we got to the year 2026 relying on keyword search where that makes sense for buying a book or a DVD, where you know the title, but that’s about the limit of keyword search,” he said.
Instead, artificial intelligence allows for textual, constraint-based research, such as finding furniture that fits specific dimensions.
This shift may benefit smaller, niche brands because AI models — which have “read the whole internet,” as Collison put it — uncover high-quality products that aren’t necessarily at the top of traditional aggregator pages or SEO-driven lists.
As PYMNTS wrote last week, agentic commerce has come a long way in the past year. In January, Google debuted its Universal Commerce Protocol, and has since introduced agentic commerce through several high-profile retailers.
Still, there are some large, lingering concerns, the report added. Agentic commerce involves turning a lot of information over to the AI platforms and payment companies supporting those transactions.
“For agents to be able to make purchases, the Visas and American Expresses of the world need to know a lot about the people they’re acting on behalf of,” PYMNTS wrote.
“Shoppers have their doubts. Almost all (95%) consumers have at least one concern about agentic commerce. Those worries range from simple mistakes like buying the wrong item to higher-stakes issues like identity theft.”
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