What Retailers Actually Think About Agentic Commerce With Stripe's Maia Josebachvili | 5IM

Foreigning us for today's five insightful minute segment is Maya Jose Bakvili.

Maya is the Chief Revenue Officer of AI at Stripe and she is here to discuss what she is really hearing from retailers as it pertains to agentic commerce.

Maya, let's start with this.

Tell us about your role as CRO of AI.

What exactly does that mean?

It's the best job I've ever had.

Well, first of all, thanks for having me.

Really happy to be here.

Of course.

At Stripe, we're building economic infrastructure for AI.

So in my role as the CRO of AI, I help both startups and enterprises navigate their AI journey.

So whether that's partnering with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Cursor on their growth needs or working with the Fortune 100 or other retailers on using AI and specifically unlocking agenda commerce, I get to help partner with all these types of customers and retailers on their journeys.

Well, Maya, I think some of our listeners might be familiar with Stripe as it relates to a payments platform, but let's elaborate on that.

What does agentic commerce mean to you and how do you define it and how does Stripe kind of fit into all of that?

Absolutely.

Stripe is so much more than a payments platform.

We're really here to build the most merchant friendly infrastructure to help our retailers on their full journey.

So when we talk about attentive commerce, there's really two forms.

The first is AI assisted, like buying inside of a chat interface.

And the second is what we'd say AI delegated, where an agent can purchase for you.

The industry really tends to talk about agent of commerce with both terms and so we use that too for both of them.

I'd say in the conversations I have with major retailers, Most see the ChatGPT style interactions as their first priority.

Right now within the agentic landscape, our goal is to help merchants with all of that.

And so we're not here to debate the definition, we're just here to help our merchants across that whole journey.

So Maya, go deeper into that for me because I'm curious, like what are the concerns you're hearing from merchants or what are the needs they're helping you that you're helping them with as they try to navigate this agentic AI commerce landscape.

It's been so fascinating.

Six months ago when I talked to retailers, it was really a sentiment of I'm not sure I want this to happen.

I don't know if I'm going to participate.

Fast forward six months, it has been a complete 180 everyone's mindset from the board to the C suite is, well, obviously we need an agenda commerce strategy, so you know, what are we going to do?

But now, even with that said, there's still some concerns that everyone has.

I'd say it really comes down to four major things.

The first one is control.

Brands want to maintain control of the customer relationship and stay merchant of record.

The second one is discoverability.

How do you make sure that your products show up when consumers are searching?

And how do you make sure your product catalog is agent legible?

That's been one of the biggest conversations I've heard.

The third one is fraud.

We've all spent 20 years blocking bots and now we're saying actually bots come by all the things.

So it's a real mindset and technology shift.

And then the fourth one is the checkout.

Again, we've spent so much time optimizing for conversion and optimizing the checkout, we what does the new flow look like when you have agenda commerce?

How do you handle payments?

What's the conversion flow?

How do you handle disputes?

All of those questions.

The good news is these are all addressable and we're partnering really closely with retailers and with AI companies to tackle them.

So I'm optimistic that we're going to figure this one out.

Well, let's go deeper on that then, Maya.

I mean, how are you helping these merchants figure out how to get control, you know, discoverability, fraud and checkout kind of in line?

Where, where does stripe come in and how are you uniquely positioned to help them do that?

What I like to say in conversations with retailers is, look, we build it so you don't have to and you can focus on what you do best.

It starts with what we launched this past fall, which is the Agent Commerce Protocol.

We launched that in partnership with OpenAI.

And the idea here is that it gives us all a shared technical language between AI agents and businesses so that we can make the transactions all happen a lot easier.

It's live today in instant checkout with ChatGPT.

And we have brands like Etsy, several Shopify merchants like Glossier and Spanx, and Walmart since joined as well.

It's also now live in Microsoft Copilot, which is called Copilot Checkout.

And there we have brands like Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropology and Etsy.

And what's great here is consumers can go through the whole entire discovery and purchase journey all within the chat without never leaving.

Now that was step one.

That was the shared language.

We then launched what we call the Agent of Commerce suite which is our solution to help businesses get ready to sell through various AI agents with one integration and without changing and here's an important one, without changing their existing commerce system.

So the suite helps our retailers 1 make their products discoverable to AI agents 2 handle the checkout, the payments and fraud protection importantly while maintaining their merchant of record and 3 pick which AI agents they want to sell through from the Stripe dashboard.

And it's been really great.

We're working with brands like Coach, Kate Spade, Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, these ones I named and E commerce platforms as well like Wix and BigCommerce and WooCommerce and Square Squarespace.

Wow, great stuff Maya.

I can't wait to have you back.

Great perspective.

Thanks for having me and thanks for everything you guys are doing for the industry.

It is a wild, wild time right now so getting your insights all the time really helps.