Stripe co-founder John Collison is urging businesses to prepare for a fundamental shift in how consumers shop: AI agents increasingly handling purchasing decisions on their behalf. The concept, dubbed "agentic commerce," represents a world where software bots autonomously negotiate, buy, and manage services for users instead of humans clicking through checkout pages.

The shift carries massive implications for payment infrastructure. Companies like Stripe that process digital transactions must adapt their systems to recognize and authorize purchases initiated by non-human entities. This means rethinking fraud detection, authentication, and the entire merchant-customer relationship when the buyer is an algorithm rather than a person.

For businesses, the change demands new strategies around pricing, API accessibility, and how products get presented to AI shoppers that evaluate options programmatically. Collison's comments signal that the payments industry views agentic commerce as an inevitable evolution rather than a distant theoretical concept.