# What is agentic commerce? Stripe’s CRO of AI explains.

- **Show:** Pioneers of AI
- **Published:** 15 Apr 2026
- **Source:** https://prfx.byspotify.com/e/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/7G0M4p2bOLP0mP50O3CD/pscrb.fm/rss/p/rss.art19.com/episodes/4a68454b-8b1b-41b5-b166-0d81b2dc3549.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIhlwb2RjYXN0Lm9wZW5uYXNoLmNvbQY6BkVU--4dcea1dd70768d62b2466884c2f8513b5f848fbf
- **Transcript:** https://podcasts.opennash.com/shows/pioneers-of-ai/what-is-agentic-commerce-stripes-cro-of-ai-explains-f9231b/
- **Provider:** OpenNash Podcasts (machine-generated)

## In brief

Maia Josebachvili, Stripe's Chief Revenue Officer of AI, argues that shopping inside AI chat tools, called agentic commerce, is a bigger shift than mobile. It moves buying to the place where people already express what they want. She says it can open new customers to merchants of all sizes, including small artisans, if the infrastructure is built to favor merchants.

The central tension is opportunity against control. Merchants fear being reduced to interchangeable products and losing their customer relationship, and fraud becomes harder when "good bots" are invited to buy. Josebachvili's answer is Stripe's design choices: merchants stay the seller of record, brands show up in discovery, and a payments-trained AI model scores risk. She also stresses that this is early days.

## Key insights

1. **Agentic commerce covers two different behaviors** Josebachvili separates autonomous agents that buy on a shopper's behalf from humans buying inside chat interfaces. She says demand today is mostly for the second, such as uploading a living-room photo and getting coffee table options.
2. **Chat shopping reaches buyers where intent forms** She argues mobile still sent shoppers to a brand's own site, while chat brings options to people already searching with AI. She says this could let local artisans appear for searches they previously could not reach.
3. **Merchants demand to stay merchant of record** Retailers worried about losing the customer relationship, so Stripe and OpenAI built their protocol so the brand appears in discovery and the merchant keeps post-purchase control. This is Stripe's answer to commodification, meaning shoppers buying on price alone.
4. **A payments foundation model sharply cut card testing** Stripe replaced separate fraud, dispute and authorization models with one model trained on tens of billions of transactions. Josebachvili says card testing fell 80% over two years and detection of that attack type rose from 59% to 97%.
5. **AI startups scale faster, and attract new fraud** Stripe data shows top AI startups hitting $30 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in about eighteen months, versus five years for 2018 SaaS companies. Free-trial abuse can leave them with huge compute bills because AI has real per-use costs.

## Questions this episode answers

### What is agentic commerce in plain English?

Josebachvili says it covers two things: AI agents that complete purchases for you, and people buying inside AI chat apps. Today the second is more common.

### Why does Stripe think AI shopping is bigger than the shift to mobile?

Josebachvili says mobile purchases still happened inside the brand's own app or site, and shoppers had to know where to go. AI chat brings product options to where people are already searching.

### Will small businesses get lost or lose their customers to AI chatbots?

Josebachvili says Stripe designed its system so merchants stay the merchant of record, meaning the official seller who owns the customer relationship, and their brand shows up in results. She adds that local artisans could reach shoppers they could not before.

### How can a store stop fraud when it wants AI agents to buy things?

Stripe uses a shared payment token, which wraps the buyer's payment credential and hands it to the merchant, along with a risk score. The score comes from a payments model trained on tens of billions of transactions.

### What does "agent legible" mean for retailers?

It means making product catalog data, including every item listing, clear enough that AI agents can understand and surface it. Josebachvili says this is a real infrastructure shift retailers need to make.

## Facts

- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:06:33]: "if you take the Forbes AI 50 and you look at anyone who takes online payments, they do so with Stripe."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:07:12]: "OpenAI released instant checkout, Microsoft Copilot has a solution, Google has a solution."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:07:31]: "autonomous agents completing purchases on behalf of consumers, and the second is humans making purchases within AI applications, such as chat interfaces."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:15:20]: "we're under the hood of the instant checkout experiences that are live today."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:09:37]: "Well, in mobile, you still had the purchase happening in the brand, and you still had to have consumers know where they were going, right?"
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:11:56]: "how do we make sure that the merchants are still the merchant of record and they can still have the customer relationship."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:15:37]: "the ones that hit 30 million in ARR did it in about eighteen months. By comparison, if we look at the SaaS companies from 2018 that got there, it took them five years."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:15:37]: "you have Lovable getting to a hundred in eight months, Manis, the general purpose agent, went from zero to 100 million in eight months."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:16:11]: "Higgsfield, if they're not on your radar, they got to 200 million in nine months."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:16:16]: "the median AI startup, when we look at the top one hundred, is operating in seventy nine countries by their second year."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:17:06]: "this hybrid subscription plus overage and usage-based billing is starting to be the norm."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:18:11]: "You fast forward, and 19 out of 20 of them had already started implementing an agentic strategy."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:19:19]: "when we designed ACP, the agentic commerce protocol that we co-launched with OpenAI and our agentic commerce suite, a core tenet of both of those was that the brand had to show up in that discovery."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:20:24]: "we have what we call the shared payment token, which basically wraps that credential and gives it to the merchant."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:21:31]: "And so we created our payments foundation model, and it's trained on tens of billions of transactions across our network."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:21:31]: "we've reduced card testing for businesses on Stripe by 80 over the last two years just by using this model."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:22:04]: "We were able to detect that class of attacks from 59 of the time to 97 almost immediately."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:22:16]: "bad actors will chain accounts together, trigger AI workloads, and then they leave the startups with massive compute bills."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:24:34]: "customers in Germany prefer to pay with G Iropay, in Brazil, Pix dominates, in India, you have to have U P I."
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:25:10]: "Before these tools, like that would have taken us two months. This one took us two weeks"
- **Maia Josebachvili** [0:25:50]: "We have an internal agent builder where anyone can go in and build an agent."
- **Rana el Kaliouby** [0:13:39]: "OpenAI announced that they are rolling out advertisements on ChatGPT, and they've actually said that these ads won't influence what products you see in answer to queries"

## Transcript

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**[0:02:02] Rana el Kaliouby:** Okay, so I wanna try an experiment. If you know me, you know I love chocolate, but I'm also trying to be healthy and, like, really thoughtful about what I put into my body. And so I am going to see if I can get AI to help. All right, so I'm opening ChatGPT, and I am going to ask it for some help finding some chocolate options. So I'm looking for a chocolate bar that has no added sugar, maybe gluten-free, is packed with antioxidants, and, hm, maybe has some protein.

**[0:02:52] Rana el Kaliouby:** Okay, so ChatGPT gave us three options Pasca, Lily's, and Choc Zero, and it basically has these like little tiles of each of the chocolate options. Lily's I've tried before, but Pasca's and Choc Zero I have not, and I'm curious to try it. So I am going to click on Pasca, and on the right, basically there's this little bar that popped up. And if I click on that, it takes me to the Pascho website where I can directly order the chocolate bar.

**[0:03:26] Rana el Kaliouby:** And I can do this all through ChatGPT. This kind of AI-powered shopping is called agentic commerce, and my guest today argues that this is the future of shopping. Maia Josebachvili is chief revenue officer of AI at Stripe. On this episode, she makes the case for AI chatbot shopping. We talk about the risk of commodification and how AI can bring new customers to businesses of every size. I'm Rana El Kelyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

**[0:04:10] Rana el Kaliouby:** Hi Maya, welcome to Pioneers of AI. I am so excited for our conversation.

**[0:04:14] Maia Josebachvili:** Hey Rana, thank you so much for having me.

**[0:04:16] Rana el Kaliouby:** So we're gonna talk about AI for most of the conversation, but before we dig in, I wanna talk about you being a very accomplished skydiver. I don't think I will ever skydive, so that sounds like too terrifying. What was that first jump like?

**[0:04:34] Maia Josebachvili:** You know, I don't know that many people grow up and say, I want to be a skydiver. I will tell you, I certainly didn't think that. And then I did my first tandem jump and I landed and I said, I want to be a skydiver, like I just knew. There's this feeling you get when you just jump out and you have, call it sixty seconds of free fall, where the whole world goes away and all you can do is think about what am I doing in this one moment?

**[0:04:59] Maia Josebachvili:** And there's just absolutely nothing like it.

**[0:05:02] Rana el Kaliouby:** Do you still skydive?

**[0:05:03] Maia Josebachvili:** No, that was Maya in her 20s. Definitely not now.

**[0:05:07] Rana el Kaliouby:** That's great. So you then went on to become a founder, and I feel like that's a kind of a different type of adrenaline rush, but still, you know, you still have to take a leap of faith. So what has your skydiving experience kinda taught you about being a founder?

**[0:05:22] Maia Josebachvili:** You know, my skydiving instructor, Oli, who was this at the time, you know, probably 40 living in Vermont, and when you're in college, 40 is very, very wise. He used to always say, you know, I'd say, Oli, I'm scared, and he would say, Well, that's good. It's a sign of intelligence. I'd be very concerned if you weren't. But what could possibly go wrong? And, you know, there's something very funny in asking what could possibly go wrong in a skydive.

**[0:05:52] Maia Josebachvili:** But what was very helpful, though, is then you'd actually just walk through what are all the things that could go wrong and figure out how you would handle them all. And I think taking a leap of faith as a founder or a leader or experimenting with new forms of AI, you can kinda go through the same process, which is really walk through what are all the things that could go wrong. And at the end of the day, it's not that bad.

**[0:06:11] Maia Josebachvili:** And so just go ahead and jump.

**[0:06:13] Rana el Kaliouby:** Yeah, go ahead and jump. I love that. So you're now at Stripe. Your current role is chief revenue officer of AI. That is a very new title. How did that come about? What does it mean? What are your responsibilities? Like? We're always very curious about the new jobs that AI is creating, and I believe this is one of them.

**[0:06:33] Maia Josebachvili:** Yeah, absolutely. At Stripe, we're creating the economic infrastructure for AI, and that means we power the world's fastest growing and most ambitious AI companies on their growth journeys. So, in fact, if you take the Forbes AI 50 and you look at anyone who takes online payments, they do so with Stripe. Amazing. So part of my job is really partnering with all of those companies, take OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, working with them on their growth journeys. We also are powering the new agent commerce wave that you're seeing across the board.

**[0:07:12] Maia Josebachvili:** So, you know, OpenAI released instant checkout, Microsoft Copilot has a solution, Google has a solution. We're powering some of the world's largest retailers on those platforms. And so And yeah,

**[0:07:27] Rana el Kaliouby:** when you say agentic commerce, what do you actually mean by that?

**[0:07:31] Maia Josebachvili:** yeah, so we're referring to AI enabled commerce in really two forms. The first one is autonomous agents completing purchases on behalf of consumers, and the second is humans making purchases within AI applications, such as chat interfaces. The industry generally uses the term agent commerce to cover both, and as we partner with our customers, they do as well, and so we think about agent commerce as the whole suite.

**[0:07:56] Rana el Kaliouby:** Of these two scenarios, which ones are more common today, and can you give us an example?

**[0:08:01] Maia Josebachvili:** Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing a lot more pull right now on the second one, which is humans buying within the chat interfaces. And so we're really focused on helping everyone prepare for the agentic era. So, as an example, buying a coffee table in the before times, you would go to ten different websites of the brands you knew, you'd go into the search and the filter and say, I want a coffee table. And you were very limited in the options.

**[0:08:29] Maia Josebachvili:** You could choose, you know, wood or metal, round or rectangular, and then you'd flip through and see what you could find.

**[0:08:36] Rana el Kaliouby:** yep, and then you would, you know, you'd get like your first 20 options, and then you have to click onto the next page and and so on.

**[0:08:42] Maia Josebachvili:** Exactly. Now you can take a picture of your living room, upload it to your favorite LLM surface and say, I'm looking for a warm, modern vibe coffee table that fits in nicely here. And what you'll get back is a few different, or, you know, if you prompt it, you can get back a few different images of different types of coffee tables already situated in your living room that fit your aesthetic.

**[0:09:06] Rana el Kaliouby:** And then you click buy.

**[0:09:07] Maia Josebachvili:** Well, that's where we're all heading, right? So today, a few retailers are live today, but we're working on powering getting more merchants live, and the vision is that Stripe will be the fastest onramp for brands to participate in agent commerce. But you can see how this is just a much more powerful shopping experience and better for the end consumer.

**[0:09:27] Rana el Kaliouby:** Yeah, you have actually said that AI is, uh, a much bigger shift for commerce than mobile was. Why do you think so?

**[0:09:37] Maia Josebachvili:** Well, in mobile, you still had the purchase happening in the brand, and you still had to have consumers know where they were going, right? What agentic really brings is the ability to bring commerce to where intent is happening. So people are already using these LLMs to search, and now we can bring the different options right where the consumer is. I'm really excited about it for a lot of reasons, but it also just then democratizes the ability for these brands to get in front of consumers.

**[0:10:13] Maia Josebachvili:** You know, we have Etsy Live and ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

**[0:10:18] Rana el Kaliouby:** That is so cool. Yeah,

**[0:10:19] Maia Josebachvili:** It's so cool. And you have these local artisans who may not always be able to get in front of, you know, X consumer, but all of a sudden now, if someone is searching for, you know, a Pokemon Halloween costume, that might now show up and give that local craft person access to consumers they didn't have before.

**[0:10:40] Rana el Kaliouby:** yeah, very cool. Actually, on that topic, because AI is changing the way we are discovering information and finding products, search engine optimization is really becoming reimagined, right? So SEO was how we found, like how basically Google surfaced products to the top. How is AI changing all that when you're shopping inside these basically malls?

**[0:11:04] Maia Josebachvili:** This is one of the big conversations that's happening right now, and brands are really thinking about how do I show up where the consumer intent is. And so the product catalog really matters, and the nature of the product catalog really matters. How do you get this information to be really agent legible?

**[0:11:25] Rana el Kaliouby:** That is a new term. What do you mean by that?

**[0:11:27] Maia Josebachvili:** You've got agents now trying to understand and make sense of all the different SKUs on your website, all the different SKUs in your product catalog. How do you make that really digestible for them so that when someone is searching for the warm coffee table, that shows up?

**[0:11:46] Rana el Kaliouby:** Right? It's basically for every product item, what is the information you have about the product, and can you make the agent access that information? That's pretty cool. Yeah,

**[0:11:56] Maia Josebachvili:** Yeah, it's a real shift in the infrastructure that these retailers need in order to participate. And so we obsess over what it takes for businesses to thrive in the agentic era without giving up control. And that control is an important piece to them. So we're talking about all the benefits. The concern we hear from a lot of merchants is that they still wanna have a relationship with the customer. And so something that was really important when we were designing the agentic commerce suite was how do we make sure that the merchants are still the merchant of record and they can still have the customer relationship.

**[0:12:34] Maia Josebachvili:** And that's been one of the big priorities as we've been building is how do we build the most merchant-friendly infrastructure so that the world's leading brands can participate in agent commerce.

**[0:12:47] Rana el Kaliouby:** we're going to take a break. When we come back, the role of ads in our agentic future. Stay with us. The companies winning right now aren't just building great AI, they're building the infrastructure to actually run a business on top of it, which is where Stripe comes in. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, with planetary scale financial infrastructure to help you power any business model. As a matter of fact, 86 of the Forbes AI 50 run on Stripe, along with industry leaders like Salesforce and Pepsi.

**[0:13:39] Rana el Kaliouby:** Last year, Stripe users processed $1.9 1 trillion combined. See how Stripe can power what's next for your business at stripe dot com. So OpenAI announced that they are rolling out advertisements on ChatGPT, and they've actually said that these ads won't influence what products you see in answer to queries, but rather they will just allow advertisers to advertise at the bottom of the ChatGPT kind of interface. What do you make of all of this?

**[0:14:13] Maia Josebachvili:** I think it's a natural extension and it's to be expected.

**[0:14:16] Rana el Kaliouby:** Do you think people should be allowed to pay more to show up more in answers to queries? I personally, I can see a world where that is fair game, but I also worry because then if I'm asking ChatGPT for advice on, I don't know what supplements to take, right? I want the answer to be impartial. So I can see the pros and cons. I don't know what about you.

**[0:14:38] Maia Josebachvili:** Yeah, I'm thinking about it because I think it's a really good question. My personal opinion is that if it is going to show up, you need to know if it was influenced by ads, and I think that might be a way to get around it. I also think it is really early days and things are going to look very different in a year and two years time, and I think a lot of companies are going to experiment and see how it all plays out.

**[0:15:03] Rana el Kaliouby:** Yeah, that I'm sure is gonna be true, cause things are moving so fast. So we had Suresh Kumar, the CTO of Walmart on the show, and he talked about how they're integrated within ChatGPT. So again, now you can be shopping and then Walmart products could show up. Does Stripe power all of that?

**[0:15:20] Maia Josebachvili:** We're under the hood on the cases today, in in some way, shape or form, different integration shapes, but we're under the hood of the instant checkout experiences that are live today.

**[0:15:29] Rana el Kaliouby:** So you power a lot of the top AI companies out there. So what are some of the trends that you're seeing?

**[0:15:37] Maia Josebachvili:** Two really major ones, and they both have to do with growth. The first one is the pace that these companies are growing at is just unprecedented. So we've indexed the top hundred AI companies on Stripe, and the ones that hit 30 million in ARR did it in about eighteen months. By comparison, if we look at the SaaS companies from 2018 that got there, it took them five years. And then even within that, you have Lovable getting to a hundred in eight months, Manis, the general purpose agent, went from zero to 100 million in eight months.

**[0:16:11] Maia Josebachvili:** Higgsfield, if they're not on your radar, they got to 200 million in nine months.

**[0:16:15] Rana el Kaliouby:** What did they do?

**[0:16:16] Maia Josebachvili:** Video generation. A And so that's all sort of, you know, at the if you're hitting 30 million or 100 million, even the companies we see that are hitting one million in ARR, the AI startups are scaling four times faster than their peers. So AI companies are global from day one. Another stat, the median AI startup, when we look at the top one hundred, is operating in seventy nine countries by their second year. Wow, seventy nine countries.

**[0:16:41] Maia Josebachvili:** That's about twice the internationalization of their equally promising earlier SaaS companies.

**[0:16:47] Rana el Kaliouby:** Yeah, it's incredible. So they're getting to revenue much faster than kind of the traditional SaaS companies. They're global from day one. And I am really curious about different monetization schemes. We're tracking that very closely as an early stage fund as well, and I find that very interesting.

**[0:17:06] Maia Josebachvili:** It really seems like right now the this hybrid subscription plus overage and usage-based billing is starting to be the norm. And I'm sure when we talk again in six months, we'll hear new things, but the rate of change is really impressive.

**[0:17:20] Rana el Kaliouby:** Yeah, I'm just kind of thinking about some of the AI companies. How can you tell if a company's going to explode in terms of revenue and growth?

**[0:17:29] Maia Josebachvili:** The journey looks different for different companies, but there are certain signals you can see of when they're about to pop, and it might just happen at different times in their trajectory.

**[0:17:40] Rana el Kaliouby:** Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So you're providing this infrastructure, but you mentioned how online retailers really wanna still own the relationship with their customer. How are you enabling that? And have you gotten any pushback from some retailers? You know, you it sounds like you're working a lot with, like, AI companies that are at the forefront of innovation, they're really reimagining what commerce looks like. But what about, like, traditional online retailers? What's the feedback been so far?

**[0:18:11] Maia Josebachvili:** The shift in the last seven months is pretty staggering also. So we have a customer advisory board with it's 20 of our largest retailer, well, largest merchants, many of them retailers. And last summer, when we were talking to them about agentic commerce, there was a lot of wait and see, I'm not sure. You fast forward, and 19 out of 20 of them had already started implementing an agentic strategy. And everyone is somewhere on the spectrum of, uh, from experimentation to I'm all in, but everyone's jumping in.

**[0:18:48] Rana el Kaliouby:** So much of retail at the moment is done through brands really investing a lot of time and effort and money into that brand identity, right? Whether it's a logo or it's, you know, the colors, the sounds. What does that look like in an agentic commerce world? And how do we prevent this world where it's just everything gets commoditized, right? I'm buying my, you know, pair of snow boots, and it doesn't really matter what brand it is.

**[0:19:19] Maia Josebachvili:** It's really top of mind for us. We obsess over what it takes for businesses to thrive in the agentic era without giving up control. And that means a couple things. That means they get to stay the merchant of record and control the whole post-purchase experience, and their brand has to show up in that interface. And so when we designed ACP, the agentic commerce protocol that we co-launched with OpenAI and our agentic commerce suite, a core tenet of both of those was that the brand had to show up in that discovery.

**[0:19:54] Maia Josebachvili:** And so this is something we heard loud and clear from our merchants. And again, we're building the most merchant-friendly infrastructure so that businesses can thrive in the agentic era, having their brand show up and having control of the customer were two of the most important tenets.

**[0:20:10] Rana el Kaliouby:** So let's talk about some of the kind of the challenges, or maybe the things to look out for. And I wanna start with fraud. In this agentic commerce world, how do we prevent fraud? And what are you guys doing about that?

**[0:20:24] Maia Josebachvili:** Yeah, absolutely. You know, we spent decades preventing bots from buying on our websites, and now we're saying, actually, we want the good bots, please come and buy all the things. And so one of the things we've launched is the shared payment token. When someone is putting in their information within a chat experience, we have what we call the shared payment token, which basically wraps that credential and gives it to the merchant. And this way the merchant can retain control, they are the merchant of record, they have a relationship with the customer.

**[0:20:59] Maia Josebachvili:** In this, we also package a risk score so that you have a better sense of how risky is that buyer, exactly. But how would you come up with this risk score? What is it based on? So how we build our fraud and risk models has completely changed. So historically, Stripe used specialized models. We had authorization optimization, we had one for fraud, one for disputes. It worked well, but recent breakthroughs in AI have shown us that actually a generalized foundation model can outperform the narrow ones.

**[0:21:31] Maia Josebachvili:** And so we created our payments foundation model, and it's trained on tens of billions of transactions across our network. So much like an LLM understands language, our payments foundation model understands payments. Oh, that is fascinating. And then it's able to basically flag if this is a payment that looks okay or is fraudulent. Yeah, so what we've seen is that as we've used this new payment foundation model, we've reduced card testing for businesses on Stripe by 80 over the last two years just by using this model.

**[0:22:04] Maia Josebachvili:** We were able to detect that class of attacks from 59 of the time to 97 almost immediately.

**[0:22:09] Rana el Kaliouby:** Wow. What are some examples of fraudulent behaviors that AI companies are experiencing?

**[0:22:16] Maia Josebachvili:** In the same way that we're seeing new monetization models and different growth, we are also seeing really new fraud patterns emerge with these AI companies. So one example is free trial abuse. So what we see is bad actors will chain accounts together, trigger AI workloads, and then they leave the startups with massive compute bills. In traditional SaaS, a stolen trial didn't matter that much because there wasn't much marginal cost. But with AI, when you have real compute costs, these can be existential for those AI startups.

**[0:22:48] Maia Josebachvili:** So we've seen some AI companies actually be forced to turn off free trials altogether because of this. We've since invested in Stripe Radar, our fraud detection tool, so that we can detect and block this behavior and help AI companies let the legitimate users go through while stopping the abusive ones.

**[0:23:06] Rana el Kaliouby:** More with Maya after a short break. Stay with us. So I want to talk next about, like, how AI is changing kind of the way we do work. So I kind of would love for you to take us inside Stripe. Yeah, one of my investment theses is basically AI is shifting value creation, and specifically through this idea of agentic AI and AI coworkers that get work done on your behalf, right? So it's not just creating a tool that helps you be more efficient, it's actually also like taking on end-to-end tasks on your behalf.

**[0:24:02] Rana el Kaliouby:** Does Stripe deploy some of these workflows, and how has that changed the way people do work, and especially culture, too, the culture of the organization?

**[0:24:12] Maia Josebachvili:** I love that you mentioned culture, because one of the most important things we've learned is that AI adoption is as much a culture shift as it is a technology shift. And what we're seeing is the companies that benefit most are the ones who build a habit of experimentation. So at Stripe, we focus on making it easy for every team to safely interact with a range of models and for those models to safely interact with our internal tools and systems.

**[0:24:34] Maia Josebachvili:** I'll give you a good example here. So local payment methods are really important for businesses for conversion, reach, or trust. And what I mean by that is, you know, customers in Germany prefer to pay with G Iropay, in Brazil, Pix dominates, in India, you have to have U P I. So being able to offer these really, really matters. Now, historically, each new payment integration required a lot of manual engineering effort. But if you take a step back, most integrations really follow a simple pattern, which is you have two APIs and you need to make sure they understand each other.

**[0:25:10] Maia Josebachvili:** So we fed an LLM our integration documents alongside the payment methods documentation, and we prompted it to say, you know, generate the integration code. And after a few iterations, it worked end to end. We now have a new pan-European payment method whose integration was almost entirely written by LLM. Before these tools, like that would have taken us two months. This one took us two weeks, and I'm pretty sure we're going to be able to bring it down to, you know, one to two days as those patterns standardize.

**[0:25:38] Rana el Kaliouby:** Yeah, yeah, so that's incredible from a productivity, obviously, perspective. How do you bring your organization along to allow people to to build these things?

**[0:25:50] Maia Josebachvili:** I think that goes back to what you were just saying about the culture, and we really try to build a culture of experimentation and encouragement and celebrate all this and encourage people to do it. We have an internal agent builder where anyone can go in and build an agent. So I was playing around this weekend with, you know, building my own agent for a couple of things. And just making it really easy for any stripe to experiment safely, I think is a really important component to this.

**[0:26:25] Rana el Kaliouby:** All right, a few more questions for you. What's kind of one use case in AI for shopping that we haven't seen yet that you would like to see?

**[0:26:33] Maia Josebachvili:** I'm really curious about how the sort of local services will end up showing up. And what I mean by that is our puppy is sick this week. And

**[0:26:45] Rana el Kaliouby:** Okay, oh, I'm sorry.

**[0:26:46] Maia Josebachvili:** We had to call. We okay,

**[0:26:49] Rana el Kaliouby:** Thank you.

**[0:26:49] Maia Josebachvili:** but we had to call, you know, our vet couldn't see him, so we have to go call a bunch of different vets. And it's not shopping in the traditional sense,

**[0:26:56] Rana el Kaliouby:** But still, you're shopping for service, right?

**[0:26:58] Maia Josebachvili:** exactly. And so how do you make that sort of discovery and booking really easy? We work with users like a jobber, who is a platform for local service providers, like whether you need a plumber or something like that. Also, it just sounds so much easier to be able to go to a chat service and say, I'm looking for, you know, a painter and be able to do it all within. So I think that's, you know, that's not coming tomorrow, but that's one experience I think could be a really interesting use case.

**[0:27:27] Rana el Kaliouby:** I would personally love the use case where you're brainstorming gifts for people, right? And hopefully you want it to be creative. And it then it kind of surfaces who does that out there, maybe through the Etsy integration. I mean, I don't know, maybe it exists already.

**[0:27:42] Maia Josebachvili:** Yes, I love that too. I mean, honestly, I did all my holiday shopping through chat services, not not the full transaction, but the here's the person and here's what they like. What do you think would be good gifts for them? So as soon as, you know, we have more merchants live, I think that's gonna be a really seamless experience.

**[0:28:04] Rana el Kaliouby:** So a lot of the way we're interacting with AI today is through a chat interface, right? There's a little bit of voice and conversation, but it's mostly chat. One of my investment theses is that we're gonna start to see more AI native devices and interfaces, whether it's glasses or maybe it's, you know, an embedded device or a wearable or whatnot. What does agentic commerce look like in this world, and do we even know?

**[0:28:28] Maia Josebachvili:** It is really early days. I think it's very clear that there will be other modalities. We feel very confident about that. Exactly how those play out, I think, is still to be seen. So there's a couple startups doing different things. We see some browser buying happening, but right now, the effort that I'm seeing across both the AI platforms and the merchants is really on the chat-based experience. And I think there's still a lot to figure out there.

**[0:28:55] Maia Josebachvili:** So my personal hypothesis is we're gonna see a lot more development there in the near term. And then I think as that starts to get more built out, we'll start to see the other modalities expand.

**[0:29:07] Rana el Kaliouby:** So Maya, do you still shop in person? And do you think AI is going to change the in-person shopping experience at all?

**[0:29:15] Maia Josebachvili:** I have to admit, I'm one of those that probably stopped shopping in person as soon as the delivery experience got really good with online shopping. But my personal hypothesis is, look, some people will always love to shop in person and they need to feel and touch. But we're seeing a lot more AI startups come out that, you know, it's an app, you can see an image of you and you can see what the clothes look like on you.

**[0:29:38] Maia Josebachvili:** And they're even starting, you know, Gemini is starting to get really good at even texture. How does fleece sit on you versus silk?

**[0:29:46] Rana el Kaliouby:** Very cool.

**[0:29:47] Maia Josebachvili:** Very cool. And so I do think we're gonna see, as that technology gets better, more people opting to, you know, shop virtually in an agentic format than what we were seeing before.

**[0:29:59] Rana el Kaliouby:** Very cool. I can't wait for that. Okay, final question. What's one way AI has changed your everyday life?

**[0:30:07] Maia Josebachvili:** I have a whole new commute ritual. Ooh, And I alternate between Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT to compare. But my drive home is me going back and forth, batting around different ideas and getting perspectives. And it's really been some of my best, you know, thinking and workshopping time.

**[0:30:28] Rana el Kaliouby:** you know, I have to say I love that use case because driving time is, you know, it's not necessarily downtime, but wouldn't it be so productive if you had a conversation with an intelligent bot in the car and ask it to, like, take notes and brainstorm and whatnot? But I will confess, I did that once and I got so into it, cause the interface isn't quite there yet, right? Like the whole like interface isn't quite. And I actually got stopped by a cop.

**[0:30:52] Rana el Kaliouby:** Yeah, so so I haven't done that again, but I love the use case. And I I do think it will get that was a few months ago and, uh, maybe it's gotten way better. I consult AI. O often it's ChatGPT, but I'm increasingly using Gemini. Before I need to get any work done, uh, when I'm brainstorming ideas for the podcast, when I'm brainstorming ideas for, like, vacations with my kids. I go to AI first, which is kind of really interest.

**[0:31:20] Rana el Kaliouby:** That's a kind of a fundamental behavior change.

**[0:31:24] Maia Josebachvili:** It's a great thought partner. It's a great thought partner. If you haven't tried it for furniture or decoration shopping, I also highly recommend that one. I now have a burnt orange and sage green throw pillows that, you know, I'm not a designer. I wouldn't have thought to do that, but ChatGPT told me it would look good, and sure enough, it works.

**[0:31:44] Rana el Kaliouby:** I love that. I'm gonna try that. Maya, thank you so much for joining us. This was great.

**[0:31:49] Maia Josebachvili:** Thanks for having me.

**[0:31:52] Rana el Kaliouby:** It was fascinating speaking with Maya. AI is reshaping the way we shop, and I love that it has the potential to bring new customers to small businesses. But I'm curious what the future of agentic commerce will look like. The chatbot is a compelling form factor given how ubiquitous it is, so integrating shopping there seems like a no-brainer. But laptops and smartphones aren't AI native, so what will agentic commerce look like with AI native interfaces? Think glasses, a wearable pins.

**[0:32:24] Rana el Kaliouby:** Like Maya said, it's still very early days. There's a lot of room and opportunity for innovation, and as an investor, I'm keeping close tabs. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back with a new episode next week for Earth Day. Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original production. Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Our producer is Rachel Ishikawa. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pew. Video editing by Eric Purcell.

**[0:33:01] Rana el Kaliouby:** Original music by Ryan Holliday. Our head of podcasts is Lital Malad. You can join the conversation across social media platforms. Just look for us at Pioneers of AI. Thanks so much for listening.