🤖 AI Summary
Overview
This episode explores how Stripe is adapting its infrastructure for an AI-driven economy, where agents—not just humans—are becoming key actors in commerce and development. Emily Glassberg Sands, head of data and AI at Stripe, discusses the rise of agentic commerce, the evolution of fraud in the AI era, and how AI companies are scaling at unprecedented speeds. The conversation also delves into new pricing models, the changing developer experience, and Stripe's innovations to support agent-native ecosystems.
Notable Quotes
- Fraud used to be a transaction thing. Now it is a full funnel thing.
— Emily Glassberg Sands, on how AI has transformed the nature of fraud.
- AI companies are growing from a revenue perspective faster than any previous cohort we've seen.
— Emily Glassberg Sands, on the explosive growth of AI businesses.
- The developer is no longer just a human. It could be a coding assistant or an agent provisioning infrastructure on a human's behalf.
— Emily Glassberg Sands, on the evolving definition of developer.
🧠 The Rise of an Agent-Driven Economy
- The internet economy is shifting from human-driven interactions to a more autonomous model where agents (AI systems) act as buyers, sellers, and builders.
- Stripe is preparing for this shift by redesigning its infrastructure to support agent-native commerce and development.
- Emily highlights that AI agents are already interacting with developer tools like Stripe's APIs, with LLM traffic to Stripe documentation increasing 10x year-over-year.
🛡️ Fraud in the AI Era: New Threats and Solutions
- AI has introduced novel fraud vectors, such as compute theft, where fraudsters exploit free trials or credits to steal expensive computational resources.
- Example: A large AI company saw only 4% of free trials convert to paid users, with the rest being fraudulent, costing $625 per paying customer.
- Stripe has expanded its fraud detection product, Radar, to cover the entire customer lifecycle—from signup to payment and overages—rather than just the checkout process.
- Fraudsters are leveraging AI to scale their operations, but Stripe counters this with its own AI tools and vast data insights, covering 2% of global GDP.
📈 Why AI Companies Are Scaling Faster Than SaaS
- AI companies are reaching $30M ARR in just 18 months on average—three times faster than the top SaaS companies of 2018.
- This growth is fueled by net-new spending rather than cannibalizing traditional SaaS or headcount budgets, though Emily predicts future shifts in spending from SaaS and operational expenses to AI.
- AI companies are experimenting with innovative pricing models, moving away from traditional seat-based pricing to usage-based and outcome-based billing.
- Example: Companies like Lovable charge based on token consumption or outcomes, aligning revenue with customer value and operational costs.
👩💻 Redefining the Developer Experience for Agents
- The traditional developer experience is evolving to accommodate agents as builders.
- Stripe's new Projects
feature allows developers or agents to provision and manage software stacks directly from the command line, reducing setup friction.
- This shift reflects a broader trend where agents are not just tools but active participants in building and interacting with software ecosystems.
🛒 Agentic Commerce: From Assisted Buying to Autonomous Purchasing
- Agentic commerce spans a spectrum:
- Assisted Buying: Agents help humans research, compare, and complete purchases.
- Autonomous Purchasing: Agents make decisions and purchases independently, based on user preferences and constraints.
- Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol, co-created with OpenAI, enables merchants to integrate once and sell across multiple agent-driven platforms like ChatGPT and Meta.
- Stripe's consumer wallet, Link, is evolving to support delegated purchases, allowing users to set guardrails for agents making purchases on their behalf.
- Current agentic commerce is focused on low-stakes commodities like Halloween costumes, but Emily predicts it will expand to more complex purchases as models and interfaces improve.
AI-generated content may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as a sole source of truth.
📋 Episode Description
Emily Glassberg Sands leads data and AI at Stripe, which processes roughly 2% of global GDP, giving her a bird’s-eye view into how AI is upending the internet economy. Dan Shipper talked with Glassberg Sands for Every's AI & I about what the data on Stripe's network actually shows: AI companies are scaling three times faster than the top SaaS cohort of 2018, fraud has moved from the checkout to the full funnel, and agents have started buying things, although mostly low-stakes commodities like Halloween costumes. The conversation covers the new fraud types unique to AI companies, the AI-on-AI arms race between bad actors and fraud detectors, where AI revenue growth is actually coming from, and how Stripe is rebuilding the payments infrastructure for a world where the buyer is an agent.If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!To hear more from Dan Shipper:Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribeFollow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipperHead to http://granola.ai/every and get 3 months free with the code EVERYTimestamps00:00:45 Introduction00:01:27 New rules for an agent-driven economy00:03:57 Compute theft is the new payment fraud00:10:00 How Stripe expanded fraud detection from checkout to the full customer lifecycle00:19:48 Why AI companies are scaling way faster than top SaaS companies00:23:27 Outcome-based billing is replacing seat-based pricing00:29:57 Where AI spending is coming from00:36:45 How the developer experience changes when agents are the builders00:41:00 The agentic commerce spectrum, from assisted buying to autonomous purchasing00:51:06 Meet Link, a consumer wallet for delegated agent purchasesLinks to resources mentioned in the episode:Emily Glassberg Sands on X: https://x.com/emilygsandsStripe: https://stripe.comStripe Radar: https://stripe.com/radarStripe Link: https://link.comLovable: https://lovable.dev