Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Joe Wasn't though, and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: So Tracy, another episode where I can mention that I've
Speaker 2: been vib no. But you know, here's something that I
Speaker 2: may have mentioned before.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you have, Joe, but.
Speaker 2: I'm not one hundred percent sure. Okay, I think I've
Speaker 2: mentioned it. It's actually very easy. You just come up
Speaker 2: with an idea and you type it in English and
Speaker 2: then it's there. You know, the hardest part registering a
Speaker 2: domain game. Yeah, so everything else is so smooth, right,
Speaker 2: You just type it in English and then you're like,
Speaker 2: have your little app or whatever, and then it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: I want to put this somewhere on the web. But
Speaker 2: then you go to like a domain name registrar. I
Speaker 2: had been using go Daddy for a long time, and
Speaker 2: then it's like, let's hit this feel for this field
Speaker 2: and this field for this field, and toggle this and
Speaker 2: this worker this page is in the A field and
Speaker 2: the app field of the B field, and I swear
Speaker 2: that's like, it's like so maddening. I just hated it
Speaker 2: so much. It's so annoying. It is the hardest part
Speaker 2: of the whole aspect.
Speaker 3: I have terrible memories as well about dealing with blue
Speaker 3: host and things like that. Is this the first time
Speaker 3: you've ever set up a domain?
Speaker 2: No, there's the thing.
Speaker 4: This is the other thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've done it before, Like I've done it before,
Speaker 2: and it's still incredibly annoying.
Speaker 3: Progress comes slow to domain registration.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's probably good reason for it to be complicated.
Speaker 2: You don't want it to switch in the wrong direction. Anyway,
Speaker 2: I was very excited a couple of weeks ago. There's
Speaker 2: actually well, the two of us were in Madrid. The
Speaker 2: company Stripe, the payments company, announced that there was going
Speaker 2: to be some agreement with cloud Flair, which does a
Speaker 2: lot of web hostings, where you could just have the
Speaker 2: agent buy a domain name for you, and so you
Speaker 2: think of one and you just type it in buy
Speaker 2: this domain name and host it there. And I immediately like,
Speaker 2: oh my god. I wrote about it the newsletter. It's like,
Speaker 2: this should be so, this would have been so nice
Speaker 2: a month a.
Speaker 3: Yet another thing that you will never have to do again,
Speaker 3: exactly let another So, I mean I saw the Stripe
Speaker 3: news and it generated a lot of buzz. And it
Speaker 3: all comes under the umbrella, I guess, of agentic commerce.
Speaker 3: So this idea that you can have agents that are
Speaker 3: actually directly transacting on your behalf with other agents or
Speaker 3: other websites. And I have to say, as someone who
Speaker 3: shops online a lot, this is the first time I
Speaker 3: feel disintermediated by AIM.
Speaker 2: I'm actually particularly excited about this episode because I'm very
Speaker 2: curious basically what you specifically will ask as someone as.
Speaker 3: A person a professional shopper.
Speaker 5: I was going to say, as a person of taste.
Speaker 5: As a person of taste, I've seen you say scrolling
Speaker 5: very nice paper like websites fuck wallpapers and things like that,
Speaker 5: and I'm curious what does it mean for that if
Speaker 5: your AI bought two years from now knows you so well.
Speaker 5: It's like, Tracy, I, I thought you needed this new
Speaker 5: wallpaper because you're doing this, I just went ahead and
Speaker 5: order it to you to be delivered tomorrow.
Speaker 2: This changes the world.
Speaker 3: It brings up so many interesting questions about discoverability and taste,
Speaker 3: as you mentioned, and also just the nature of the Internet,
Speaker 3: because when I think about the Internet, like a lot
Speaker 3: of other things, it's basically built to sell you things,
Speaker 3: whether that's products or information content, and we know that
Speaker 3: it also runs on those sales in the sense that
Speaker 3: a lot of the Internet is driven by advertising, which
Speaker 3: is related to traffic. Obviously, we actually did that episode
Speaker 3: way back about how the Internet runs on millions se
Speaker 3: ad auctions. That's and so this topic of agentic commerce
Speaker 3: and the payment system, obviously it's of interest to anyone
Speaker 3: who shops and does stuff online, but it's also really
Speaker 3: relevant to the actual evolution of the Internet.
Speaker 2: Couldn't agree more and I would go further and say
Speaker 2: it's really important for like culture itself, advertising creation of culture.
Speaker 2: Adds are influential. Ads do all this stuff. What if
Speaker 2: there's a changing and advertise it all these kind of stuff. Anyway,
Speaker 2: let's stop hearing from ourselves. We really do have the
Speaker 2: perfect guest, someone we've wanted to talk to for a
Speaker 2: long time, someone who's right in the thick of it
Speaker 2: and all this stuff with agentic commerce and payments. We're
Speaker 2: going to be speaking with John Collison, the president and
Speaker 2: co founder of Stripe. So, John, thank you so much
Speaker 2: for coming on odd Lots great to be here. I'm
Speaker 2: very excited. Yeah, buzzwords et cetera. What is quote agentic
Speaker 2: commerce unquote.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so there's a bit of a definitional question, but
Speaker 4: broadly it is AI buying something for you. Okay, And
Speaker 4: we think about this in two categories. One is on
Speaker 4: the consumer side of things. This is where you were
Speaker 4: a skeptical whether Tracy will ever be an adopter, where
Speaker 4: you research something in Chatchy t or claud or what
Speaker 4: have you, and then go buy us there or have
Speaker 4: it buy it for you. But then the second is
Speaker 4: your cloud Flare example, and so it's B to B
Speaker 4: or developer led agentic commerce where you're just trying to
Speaker 4: have cloud code do something for you. And as parts
Speaker 4: of this needs to buy resources, and we can talk
Speaker 4: about that because are quite different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Tracy, and we'll get to this. But the resources
Speaker 2: is another thing I've whined about, which is that when
Speaker 2: you do an API key, you're like, have an idea
Speaker 2: and you're like, oh, you have to go to the
Speaker 2: web enter credit card number. That's really annoying, et cetera.
Speaker 2: But we'll get into that. But that is another big
Speaker 2: element of it that I feel like is getting closer
Speaker 2: to being solved.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, on this credit card point, I mean, the
Speaker 3: history of online payments is basically a continuous elimination of
Speaker 3: the friction, right and going from I have to enter
Speaker 3: my credit card details to I have to log into
Speaker 3: PayPal too. Now I can just basically click a button,
Speaker 3: whether it's Apple pay or something else. Is agentic commerce?
Speaker 3: Is this just another leg of the frictionless process or
Speaker 3: is something fundamental in your view changing here?
Speaker 4: Both? So part of agentic commerce is just reducing the friction.
Speaker 4: And you're right that the general direction of travel over time,
Speaker 4: you're back to the introduction of credit cards, when the
Speaker 4: earliest adopters of computer networks, and then the originally commerce
Speaker 4: and now like you're saying, well, it's like Apple paying,
Speaker 4: Google pay, and we have a product call link and
Speaker 4: things like that. So there's generally been this elimination of friction.
Speaker 4: And our view is that at a very minimum, we're
Speaker 4: going to see and Tracy, I think this is where
Speaker 4: you can maybe get behind us. Is leave aside any
Speaker 4: agent decision making that's happening just the final step of
Speaker 4: buying something. You know, you might have researched a product
Speaker 4: in an AI app before, where you're going back and forth.
Speaker 4: I was trying to buy a bike case recently to
Speaker 4: travel with my bike, and you're asking all these questions
Speaker 4: hard versus soft and do you need to take off
Speaker 4: the handlebars? And what's the right one? And it's finding
Speaker 4: all these cool little niche brands. I think it's actually
Speaker 4: quite good for smaller merchants, by the way, because you
Speaker 4: have the ability for them to be discovered that they
Speaker 4: mightn't have had otherwise. But anyway, when you find the
Speaker 4: product at the very end, do you really then want
Speaker 4: to go and be filling out all these web form
Speaker 4: fields and things like that, or do you want to
Speaker 4: just say, yeah, that sounds good, buy it for me
Speaker 4: in this size And our best is that people will
Speaker 4: want the lower friction option. I think in the history
Speaker 4: of technology, the lower friction option tends to win out,
Speaker 4: and so we think that clearly will happen and is
Speaker 4: happening to some degree already. It's just the agent filling
Speaker 4: out the forums for you. I think where you get
Speaker 4: this interesting question is and when people hear a genta commerce,
Speaker 4: I think their mind jumps to the agent actually having
Speaker 4: some autonomy and some decision making for you. I think
Speaker 4: they're The problem is people somehow jump to the examples.
Speaker 4: Anyone who talks about this from them, they pick terrible examples.
Speaker 4: They're like, oh, the agent will book you know, all
Speaker 4: the activities on your vacation for you. It's like people
Speaker 4: think about they daydream about their vacation.
Speaker 3: All yeah, part researching and buddy is the fun part.
Speaker 4: That's the fun part. Or similarly with women's fashion, it's
Speaker 4: like the whole point is the scrolling, not just the buying.
Speaker 4: And so people pick these, you know, super enjoy Like
Speaker 4: it's the robots taking the jobs and when people want
Speaker 4: to keep those scrolling jobs. And so when you think
Speaker 4: about robots having autonomy, I would instead profer some examples
Speaker 4: where you really don't need to be You give the
Speaker 4: AI a recipe and say buy the things that we
Speaker 4: need to make this tonight, and yeah, the AI can
Speaker 4: probably guess that you have salt and you have garlic
Speaker 4: at home, but you need the grand pork. Or again
Speaker 4: then migrating to the B to B example, no one
Speaker 4: needs to configure yes another domain and go through all
Speaker 4: those forms. If claud codes can work with cloud flare
Speaker 4: to buy the domain for you and set it up,
Speaker 4: I think Joe will be much happier. I just feel
Speaker 4: like he's missed out on a valuable life experience.
Speaker 2: I want to talk more about the B to B stuff,
Speaker 2: but let's for a moment stick around on the B
Speaker 2: two C element, because I think there are gradations of this,
Speaker 2: so one is just another elimination of the friction layer.
Speaker 2: At the far end of the spectrum, conceivably there will
Speaker 2: be things where the AI truly does anticipatory buy you
Speaker 2: things that you didn't know you need, etc. Then there
Speaker 2: might be like some middle I saw this screenshow recently
Speaker 2: and I couldn't find it before the episode. Someone tweeted it.
Speaker 2: But some retailer I think was a shoe retailer had
Speaker 2: put a bunch of shoes on their website, but instead
Speaker 2: of like putting any brand names on the shoe, like
Speaker 2: we would say like a Nike Pegasus or a Nike
Speaker 2: Air Jordan, all of the shoes were like hiking boot
Speaker 2: that's good for semi serious hiker.
Speaker 4: Do you see this.
Speaker 2: Currently like where we are on the augentic commerce trajectory,
Speaker 2: do you see this currently where there's already a change
Speaker 2: in how retailers are presenting or displaying or promoting their
Speaker 2: wares such that they're more at tuned for what the
Speaker 2: chatbot would identify or the AI would identify as cool
Speaker 2: versus what a human influenced by brands would pick up
Speaker 2: is cool.
Speaker 4: Yes and no. I mean there's definitely changes. I think
Speaker 4: some of the stuff that's most notable is often not
Speaker 4: the most relevant. It's a little bit It sounds like
Speaker 4: what you're describing is a little bit like the Thai
Speaker 4: restaurant calls typhood near too, you know, do best in
Speaker 4: the se But I think what we see as kind
Speaker 4: of maybe a more interesting direction of travel is again
Speaker 4: what's happening already some amount of the form fields being
Speaker 4: filled out for you and kind of the friction reduction
Speaker 4: and a huge amount of again I presume you guys
Speaker 4: have both done this is at research in AI apps,
Speaker 4: And you know, the way I would frame that is
Speaker 4: just keyword search is ridiculous. It's ridiculous that we got
Speaker 4: to the year twenty twenty six relying on keyword search,
Speaker 4: where that makes sense for buying a book or a DVD,
Speaker 4: where you know the title of the book or a
Speaker 4: DVD that you're trying to buy. But that's about the
Speaker 4: limit of keyword search. And so the fact that anyone
Speaker 4: was trying to buy furniture or clothes or anything like that,
Speaker 4: and there was this text box at the top of
Speaker 4: the website where you put in your keywords. It's like,
Speaker 4: that's just that's not how anyone shops in the real word,
Speaker 4: things like that. And so we're seeing this AI powered
Speaker 4: research where people can explore product space and start to
Speaker 4: give constraints and you have this textual search interface, but
Speaker 4: you end up with kind of much higher search where
Speaker 4: it's like, Okay, I have a spot in this room
Speaker 4: where I'm looking for a piece of furniture that's this
Speaker 4: why is max and this high because I need to
Speaker 4: fit it in there. That's the kind of thing that's
Speaker 4: just much better suited to the imodaliti. So you see
Speaker 4: different kinds of product research possible. And like we said,
Speaker 4: it's very helpful to smaller brands because people aren't necessarily
Speaker 4: stuck behind the traditional aggregators anymore. They can break out.
Speaker 4: And again I have found in my little research projects
Speaker 4: that I've done, finding how you often get these small
Speaker 4: brands surfaced that you mightn't have heard of before. And
Speaker 4: so we think it's actually probably quite good for the dynamism.
Speaker 3: Well let me ask Joe's question in a slightly different way,
Speaker 3: which is, if we assume that in the future, if
Speaker 3: I'm a business selling something online. Previously I was selling
Speaker 3: to humans more or less, like maybe I'd optimize for
Speaker 3: Google search results or whatever, but like, mostly I'm trying
Speaker 3: to appeal to humans, and now I'm trying to appeal
Speaker 3: more to agents. What does optimizing for agents actually look like?
Speaker 4: Part of it is similar to traditional SEO, right, so
Speaker 4: you want to be legible to those agents, you want
Speaker 4: to be discovered by them. But part of what, at
Speaker 4: least I've seen is that the ais have pretty good taste. Joe,
Speaker 4: I don't know if you've found this in your vibe coding.
Speaker 4: By the way, Joe, I'm reminded of its sort of
Speaker 4: like the old joke, how do you know if someone
Speaker 4: vibe codes they'll tell you about it exactly but guilt,
Speaker 4: And I'm guessing you found that theies are very tasteful
Speaker 4: at picking libraries and picking specific subcomponents to use. And similarly,
Speaker 4: in our kind of early experience of the agenta commerce,
Speaker 4: they're quite tasteful in finding tools that suit the job
Speaker 4: pretty well. And so I think you may get this
Speaker 4: more efficient market phenomenon, where at least in picking coding
Speaker 4: libraries or something like that, the ais are have quite
Speaker 4: like I find when I do stuff, they're discovering libraries
Speaker 4: that are perfect for the job that I hadn't even
Speaker 4: heard of, or something like that. I think you're starting
Speaker 4: to see the same phenomenon with products, where again I've
Speaker 4: had the experience of you know, I was trying to
Speaker 4: find a travel adapter and I found it from this
Speaker 4: tiny company. This I had never heard of, was doing
Speaker 4: exactly what I want to where it's like an integrated
Speaker 4: travel adopter in power break. It's really good and I
Speaker 4: would never have come across that company otherwise.
Speaker 2: This is incredibly important because, as I mentioned the beginning,
Speaker 2: advertising creates culture. It's part of culture, especially iconic advertising.
Speaker 2: And maybe it'll be a little while before the Nikes
Speaker 2: of the world, they're the Nikes and Apples of the world.
Speaker 2: They're going to be advertising for a long time. But
Speaker 2: do you see this eventually as sort of like one
Speaker 2: of the things I think that the Internet appreciates about
Speaker 2: Stripe as a company is you and your brother's commitment
Speaker 2: to interesting discussions of economics and so forth, and you
Speaker 2: talk about econ history. There are great debates about whether
Speaker 2: spending is a huge deadweight loss on the economy or
Speaker 2: whether it's something positive, et cetera. And I'm curious, could
Speaker 2: you see a sort of post advertising future, you know,
Speaker 2: at some point on the horizon.
Speaker 4: No, I think we're quite skeptical of that for two reasons.
Speaker 4: One again, with agentic commerce, we don't think the human
Speaker 4: goes away and the human in the loop goes away.
Speaker 4: And there's a huge amount of agentic commerce that can
Speaker 4: happen like we're describing, where you still have the human
Speaker 4: as the end decider. And so it will likely to
Speaker 4: be the case that if you are searching for something,
Speaker 4: if you have on a new microphone for the adlot's studio,
Speaker 4: you might ask it to go research and it'll present
Speaker 4: three or four different options with different trade offs. There's
Speaker 4: no right microphone that is going to be kind of
Speaker 4: castrated on anythings like that. And then ultimately you will
Speaker 4: make a call and it'll go buy it for you.
Speaker 4: And when you make that call, some brand preference you have,
Speaker 4: Oh sure, I just know that they're like the ones
Speaker 4: with the really good sound quality. Not clear why you
Speaker 4: have that association. Maybe there some advertising in there somewhere,
Speaker 4: But so we think brand preference and as part of
Speaker 4: that advertising will clearly stick around. Because again it's definitely
Speaker 4: not going to be the case that agentic commerce means
Speaker 4: no humans make buying decisions. That's absolutely not case. But
Speaker 4: again this may be a good example. You want to
Speaker 4: buy new microphones for the studio, you do a lot
Speaker 4: of AI research, you don't have a human decide, and
Speaker 4: then you do a lot of AI execution, and so
Speaker 4: it's a on both sides, and then human decision making
Speaker 4: in the middle. Brand affinity really matters in that world.
Speaker 4: The other thing, of course, is commerce can be directed
Speaker 4: or undirected. Where in the directed side, like I was saying,
Speaker 4: trying to buy a bike, case it's like this is
Speaker 4: a thing that I know I need to go do.
Speaker 4: I'm going to go do some research. Previously, you know,
Speaker 4: Google ad might have been irrelevant to me, whereas now
Speaker 4: it's what appears in the AI search results. Obviously that
Speaker 4: does remove some advertising, but for now at least, maybe
Speaker 4: some of the AI as at least choose to bring
Speaker 4: back some advertising in those cases. But then a lot
Speaker 4: of shopping is undirected where you're scrolling Instagram, and the
Speaker 4: joke goes that these days on Instagram, the ads are
Speaker 4: better than the organic content because they've gotten so good
Speaker 4: with the targeting and there's nice, reassuring things that you
Speaker 4: might want to buy, and there that is advertising, and
Speaker 4: people are going to stay scrolling social apps and finding
Speaker 4: cool products they want to buy. So I wouldn't be
Speaker 4: short advertising in this world.
Speaker 3: You mentioned machine readability earlier. Talk to us about the
Speaker 3: actual process of converting your catalog into something that an
Speaker 3: agent can actually read, and how standardized that is at
Speaker 3: the moment, and how standardized do you expect it to
Speaker 3: be in the future. And then also, like, if you're
Speaker 3: standardizing for machine readability, I feel like it's difficult to
Speaker 3: capture some of what might make a product interesting. It's
Speaker 3: difficult to like code the actual vibes of a product.
Speaker 3: Even with lms. I just find there's something difficult to capture.
Speaker 3: So talk to us about how you make you make
Speaker 3: it so that agents fully understand what is available to them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so there's two levels here. The first is just
Speaker 4: being known in the same way that you'd be known
Speaker 4: to humans. Because obviously all the lms have read the
Speaker 4: whole Internet. That's what they're trained on, and they can
Speaker 4: do web searches. And so if you have good product
Speaker 4: pages that are informative and lay out the details of
Speaker 4: what the product does. If you have reviews, you know,
Speaker 4: if there's like a bunch of wirecutter reviews things like that,
Speaker 4: you've probably seen this in research searches where you know,
Speaker 4: the AI app will say, you know, people love this
Speaker 4: product and they say X, y Z, but they've read
Speaker 4: the whole internet, and so being known, you know, I'm
Speaker 4: a big deal on the internet helps with the AI
Speaker 4: apps as it does for humans. That's kind of step one.
Speaker 4: Step two, and where a stripe gets more involved is
Speaker 4: you need a lot of the mechanical wiring up so
Speaker 4: that the ais can do stuff that are more programmatic.
Speaker 4: And this is where our agentic commerce suites that we
Speaker 4: you know, had an announcement about, and this is what
Speaker 4: we're working on with Google and Microsoft and Meta and
Speaker 4: you know open ai and all those folks to actually
Speaker 4: do some of the commerce wiring up. And there, I'd
Speaker 4: say it's two things. One is you need a machine
Speaker 4: compatible way to get the very latest information about the
Speaker 4: product details. So it's one thing for the AI to
Speaker 4: have in its training run maybe a year ago, read
Speaker 4: the whole internet and know that that this product is good.
Speaker 4: You need to be able to tell the AI is
Speaker 4: it still on sale, whats skews are in stock, which
Speaker 4: sizes we have right now, and things like that, and
Speaker 4: so that kind of up to date, being able to
Speaker 4: make real time calls to the seller so that the
Speaker 4: AI has fresh, correct information that it can present. That's
Speaker 4: thing one, and then thing two is wiring up the
Speaker 4: agentic checkout so the AI can actually buy it. And
Speaker 4: here you get into a bunch of boring like payments details.
Speaker 4: But for example, you you're not allowed you don't want
Speaker 4: to be you're not allowed to describe that's true.
Speaker 2: Detail is boring. So start yeah, keep going.
Speaker 4: Start Okay. So then for actually kind of handling a
Speaker 4: three way transaction where there's you in chat GBT buying
Speaker 4: a product from this something like that, we're facilitating that
Speaker 4: transaction and there you want to be. You don't have
Speaker 4: to be re entering your payment details on each website.
Speaker 4: At the same time, you don't want to be flinging
Speaker 4: your payment details around across different websites. And so we
Speaker 4: built all the wiring up and also don't forget, a
Speaker 4: lot of websites have Historically bots used to be a
Speaker 4: bad thing. They used to discriminating spots. They would have
Speaker 4: bought protections and things like that, whereas now it's like, okay, no,
Speaker 4: we actually want agents to be able to do this,
Speaker 4: and so you're unwinding some of the bot protections and
Speaker 4: having a little tsa pre for the bots that we
Speaker 4: work with, a way to kind of securely transfer one
Speaker 4: time use payment credential and things like this. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of wiring up beneath the c businesses have to do.
Speaker 2: This is actually maybe like a good spot to slightly
Speaker 2: seg over into the B to B element of agentic commerce,
Speaker 2: because this gets to another thing that I think about,
Speaker 2: you know, I know one of the things that a
Speaker 2: valuable training data is literally just looking at user mouse behavior,
Speaker 2: right because then theoretically the AI model can go to
Speaker 2: a website and click the buttons just the way a
Speaker 2: human want. Well, it seems silly to me, like, ultimately,
Speaker 2: if we're building a human we're building websites for human use,
Speaker 2: and then a bot's going to actually scrape them, why
Speaker 2: not just actually build it for bots in the first place?
Speaker 2: What are we seeing there. What are you seeing from
Speaker 2: retailers where the fundamental experience is it going to be
Speaker 2: reshaped such that what we call the UX, the user
Speaker 2: experience is not really the U is not the person,
Speaker 2: but the U is the bot? And is that changing
Speaker 2: how the Internet is just going to look?
Speaker 4: So you're getting to a very core debate that's happening
Speaker 4: in AI right now, Like some of these kind of
Speaker 4: questions at the frontier of AI as to where things
Speaker 4: go for practical purposes, but one of them is when
Speaker 4: you think about AI adoption for real world tasks, there's
Speaker 4: almost a race between maybe we make the world consumable
Speaker 4: by AI, and we make the websites friendly for AIS
Speaker 4: to navigate and things like that, or maybe just the
Speaker 4: AIS get good enough unstructured computer use that you give
Speaker 4: them a desktop, and you give them a mouse and
Speaker 4: a keyboard, and there's no backwards compatibility that we built,
Speaker 4: but they just end up figuring his house anyway. And
Speaker 4: it feels like over the next year, two or maybe three,
Speaker 4: this question will be resolved. Right now, a lot of people,
Speaker 4: including us, are working on making the stripe dashboard, merchant
Speaker 4: website things like that consumable by the AIS. And what
Speaker 4: that means basically is text where the AIS are very
Speaker 4: good at working with text, and so you need a
Speaker 4: textual interface for a bunch of things that previously might
Speaker 4: have been clicking around on a website.
Speaker 2: But maybe sorry, just to be clear, this reminds me
Speaker 2: a little bit about the debate whether like apps in
Speaker 2: the app Store should be skewmorphic or not. But just
Speaker 2: to be clear, Stripe is kind of taking a bet
Speaker 2: on the other side that actually, the websites that look
Speaker 2: like they're designed for humans will not be the way
Speaker 2: to place where to place your chips.
Speaker 4: Well, it's an option, right, because ais get really good
Speaker 4: at computer use quickly, then it's good, you know, then
Speaker 4: we have that answer. And you see this a little bit.
Speaker 4: When people get their open Claw to go buy something
Speaker 4: and it's running on their Macmini at home. The merchant
Speaker 4: might say, oh, but I don't have an agentic interface.
Speaker 4: It's like, well, we bought it anyway. The Claw just
Speaker 4: went and did it and used a headless browser. And
Speaker 4: so you don't need to do anything to enable the
Speaker 4: computer use world, because the whole point is that it's
Speaker 4: fully backwards compatible with the current world. But in the meantime,
Speaker 4: I think people want to have these really powerful agentic experiences.
Speaker 4: It's a bit of a race, right, I think businesses
Speaker 4: correctly you want to be the first ones to capture
Speaker 4: all this demand, because I think it'd be the case
Speaker 4: if you start getting presented results in an AI app
Speaker 4: and it's like, Okay, here are a bunch of options.
Speaker 4: This one you can just click buy now and it'll
Speaker 4: arrive in two days, or this one you have to
Speaker 4: go to the website and click around and blah blah
Speaker 4: blah blah. I think you start seeing some consumer preference
Speaker 4: for the one they click one, kind of like on Amazon,
Speaker 4: when there's like a seller that has Amazon Prime in
Speaker 4: the third party sellers, you're way more likely to pick that.
Speaker 4: And Amazon has done studies on this. You can imagine
Speaker 4: and aagous world within the AI apps where the businesses
Speaker 4: that supports agentic commerce sooner outperform the ones that don't.
Speaker 3: Can you talk to us about how agentic commerce could
Speaker 3: impact prices? And we all know that already. When people
Speaker 3: are researching for products, you might put in a prompt
Speaker 3: saying like find me the cheapest pair of I don't
Speaker 3: know sneakers that fit the following standard, and so you
Speaker 3: could imagine a world where lots and lots of consumers
Speaker 3: are being driven to the cheapest possible option for their needs.
Speaker 3: And you could also imagine a world where maybe shops
Speaker 3: start to respond with more sophisticated price pack architecture, maybe
Speaker 3: dynamic pricing or something like that, which makes me wonder
Speaker 3: if the future is just going to be bots negotiating
Speaker 3: with each other over price endlessly.
Speaker 4: I think it's a bit I mean, we can all
Speaker 4: speculate it. I think it's a bit too early to
Speaker 4: have realized data there, because one, it's an early phenomenon obviously. Secondly,
Speaker 4: the leading edge of AI apps is quite high income,
Speaker 4: which is it's not necessarily representative of what the durable
Speaker 4: equilibrium will be. The one that we think about a
Speaker 4: lot is micro transactions are probably going to be now possible. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so you probably have this whole segment of commerce
Speaker 4: that previously wasn't double its micro transactions. They never work,
Speaker 4: or never have worked historically because of the kind of
Speaker 4: mental load of deciding. There's no point at selling Bloomberg
Speaker 4: articles for you know, forty cents each, because by the
Speaker 4: time you've decided, you might as well, just have bought
Speaker 4: a day pass or a subscription or something like that. However,
Speaker 4: if Bloomberg, and actually I would love if Bloomberg had
Speaker 4: a proper API for their data, because if you want
Speaker 4: to do anything involving in finance, when your vibe coding,
Speaker 4: it'd be really handy to have the Bloomberg data. And
Speaker 4: the terminal is not exactly at the right interface for AI,
Speaker 4: but selling Bloomberg data by the SIP, so it's like, Okay,
Speaker 4: we're doing a query about the strait of Hormuz. Let's
Speaker 4: pull in the Bloomberg DTA for that, and you pay
Speaker 4: whatever a small amount for that one little data request.
Speaker 4: That's a micro transaction that could actually happen. So that's
Speaker 4: the big effect that we think the time is finally
Speaker 4: there because the mental load has traditionally been too high
Speaker 4: for humans. But I just love overthinking things. They love
Speaker 4: scrutinizing every decision, and so we might as well do that.
Speaker 3: This is something I've been thinking about as well. If
Speaker 3: micro transactions become friction, yes, right, do people try to
Speaker 3: monetize more and more content such that basically like you're
Speaker 3: kind of paying attack to browse the internet.
Speaker 2: By the way, John, I just want to let you know.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you know this, but Bloomberg has
Speaker 2: actually delegated some of these big strategic questions to me
Speaker 2: and Tracy so we can They've actually said, no, the
Speaker 2: podcasters should get to do that, so that we could work,
Speaker 2: we could actually talk about this.
Speaker 4: If you guys could put word in with Mike and
Speaker 4: the crew that just I would like my coding agents
Speaker 4: to be able to talk to Bloomberg.
Speaker 3: Ye, like we're messaging him right now.
Speaker 2: But no, there's actually once again perfectly segs to my
Speaker 2: next question. One of the things for I hear from
Speaker 2: I've heard for years from my software developer friends. They
Speaker 2: use this binary free as in beer or free as
Speaker 2: in speech. Right, so there's like software that you can
Speaker 2: downloa for free, and that's you know, that's freeze and beer.
Speaker 2: But then free can also mean sort of like can
Speaker 2: do anything you want with that freeze in speech. I'm
Speaker 2: wondering on this point whether we need a third sort
Speaker 2: of one. Free isn't roaming free roaming because every piece
Speaker 2: of data is theoretically valuable to a model maker, and
Speaker 2: every interaction with a piece of data, which maybe is
Speaker 2: called metadata that's all that interaction activity is also very valuable,
Speaker 2: et cetera. And I'm curious, given that every interaction and
Speaker 2: any version of that is valuable, are we going to
Speaker 2: be at the end of the sort of free roaming
Speaker 2: internet or we where we always just be paying these
Speaker 2: brilliant of ascent micro transactions which theoretically become doable and
Speaker 2: reasonable as we just sort of go along the internet
Speaker 2: surf the web, because this is all very valuable information
Speaker 2: that's theoretically being exposed.
Speaker 4: I don't think AI is causing the end of the
Speaker 4: free roaming Internet, because there's always been a lot of
Speaker 4: propriety three stuff newspaper paywalls. I don't remember a free
Speaker 4: roaming Bloomberg that I could read without paying even the
Speaker 4: aire that's a subscription.
Speaker 2: Man, you can actually get the terminal. Sorry, yes, I
Speaker 2: feel like I know you really want our term anyway, Sorry,
Speaker 2: keep going.
Speaker 4: Yes, So there's always been a lot of prietary stuff
Speaker 4: on the kind of consumer side where you know, this
Speaker 4: content is only available behind a paywall. And then again
Speaker 4: to the data point this Bloomberg and fact set and
Speaker 4: FMP and you know, all these different providers, and so
Speaker 4: I think, what all the providers are thinking about is
Speaker 4: how do I make this stuff available to the AI
Speaker 4: without just necessarily making it available for free. And so
Speaker 4: what that looks like with the data owners is content
Speaker 4: licensing deals. Right, Reddit now makes a lot of money
Speaker 4: from selling the Reddit data. Because you have all this
Speaker 4: like super interesting human discussion, you have the various media
Speaker 4: publishers either kind of suing or doing partnerships with or
Speaker 4: both the AI companies. We're very interested in data providers generally,
Speaker 4: Like we did a demo of sessions as to how
Speaker 4: you know you could do a financial research project with
Speaker 4: your coding agents buying the information it needs to put
Speaker 4: together the PDF answer. But we're quite airly in that journey.
Speaker 4: But no, I think there's been lots of proprietary data
Speaker 4: for a long time, and so it's more about how
Speaker 4: do we open that up to AI agents. I'm not
Speaker 4: sure you'd see that much of a constriction on what's
Speaker 4: available on the free Internet.
Speaker 3: But just to push back on that a little bit,
Speaker 3: there's also been a lot of free stuff on the Internet,
Speaker 3: and one of the reasons it's been free is because
Speaker 3: of traffic and advertising. And so if that's not going
Speaker 3: to get as much advertising or traffic anymore, because everything
Speaker 3: is going through an LLM platform and people just aren't
Speaker 3: linking back directly. The temptation would be to try to
Speaker 3: make up that revenue by charging for the actual content.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that assumes that what the AIS want to
Speaker 4: browse and what the humans want to browse will be
Speaker 4: the same thing, And I'm not sure that'll necessarily be
Speaker 4: the case. Where there'll still be the case that's say
Speaker 4: for media properties, you know that is aimed at human consumption,
Speaker 4: and so they'll do fine with the advertising revenue they had.
Speaker 4: Maybe they have some incremental revenue that they can guess
Speaker 4: from the AI stuff. And then I mean, maybe you're
Speaker 4: right that the really crummy aggregator pages where it's like
Speaker 4: top ten lists. You know, you google something and you
Speaker 4: get some SEO page and there's like a million taboolah
Speaker 4: ads on us that you're trying to kick through, and
Speaker 4: the pop over takes over your screen. Maybe those sites
Speaker 4: have a harder time, But I don't think anyone's going
Speaker 4: to really be too sad about that.
Speaker 2: But you've talked about this yourself, I think in a
Speaker 2: recent speech you gave. It's actually depressing to me because
Speaker 2: now thanks to the vibe coding apps. There's a bunch
Speaker 2: of stuff I would have liked to build, say around
Speaker 2: Twitter data, right, And there was an actual era in
Speaker 2: which a lot of these social platforms are very open
Speaker 2: with their APIs, et cetera. And now everything's sort of
Speaker 2: shut down, so you can't even really, you know, unless
Speaker 2: I want to spend thousands of dollars, you couldn't really
Speaker 2: build like an app that does something with someone's Twitter account,
Speaker 2: et cetera. And I think you talked about this in
Speaker 2: your recent speech. Doesn't this further accelerate the move of
Speaker 2: everyone to just sort of clamp down and allow people
Speaker 2: to roam their site and slop up data.
Speaker 4: Yes, but just to clarify the human roaming has you know,
Speaker 4: you can still browse free. You can still browse Twitter
Speaker 4: for free. What they're clamping down on in some cases
Speaker 4: is AI training scraping where they want to put a
Speaker 4: toll on that. And maybe they didn't kind of intend
Speaker 4: for all that information to be kind of freely available
Speaker 4: to the AI apps, And there you can argue whether
Speaker 4: that should be freely available to Open a eye and
Speaker 4: Google and everyone like that, or they should have to
Speaker 4: pay for us. But it's not the case that are
Speaker 4: very important intellectual commons is of reddis and X and
Speaker 4: all the other asylums that we like to frequent our
Speaker 4: gougway for us as humans.
Speaker 2: You know, you're talking about micro transactions, and people have
Speaker 2: been talking about micro transactions for literally decades, probably in
Speaker 2: the example you gave of oh, why can't we just
Speaker 2: buy an article for fifty cents? I think there's various
Speaker 2: reasons why that never took off, But one aspect is
Speaker 2: just the cost of a transaction. And with theoretically, particularly
Speaker 2: with like stable coins, you could have almost free transactions.
Speaker 2: Are you seeing actual use of stable coins in sort
Speaker 2: of B to B transactions because the sheer cost is
Speaker 2: so low? Like, where do stable coins come into this?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're right. This when you have this pay by
Speaker 4: the SIP model, you obviously just can't economically speaking, have
Speaker 4: kind of a an individual card transaction per per usage.
Speaker 4: And by the way, this is the economic model of
Speaker 4: the AI economy because you have marginal costs for each token,
Speaker 4: and so no one really offers an all you can
Speaker 4: eat plan. You can subscribe to chat, GPT or cloud
Speaker 4: or something like that, and you'll have a plan and
Speaker 4: you'll eventually hit usage limits, or you can pay on
Speaker 4: an API basis, and you know you'll top up with
Speaker 4: some amount of credits and then burn down the tokens.
Speaker 4: But everyone charges per usage at some level, and so
Speaker 4: then what do you do? And the kind of common
Speaker 4: mode which we power a lot of, is kind of
Speaker 4: this usage based billing. We actually bought a company on
Speaker 4: Metronome to power that where you track credits, right, and
Speaker 4: so that kind of telco billing, you have your card
Speaker 4: on file and then you track credits. We are quite
Speaker 4: excited about what you're referencing, which is stable coins for this.
Speaker 4: You're asking kind of how much are we seeing of
Speaker 4: it right now? Not that much yet, but we're building
Speaker 4: out all the infrastructure for us. The place where I
Speaker 4: think stable coins could be really exciting is you don't
Speaker 4: have to then go have a relationship with all these services.
Speaker 4: And so if you want a vibe code little website
Speaker 4: and you're like, Okay, I'm going to buy the domain
Speaker 4: from cloud flare and host on versil and all these things,
Speaker 4: you know you've had the experience of you have to
Speaker 4: go and sign up for all these services and these things.
Speaker 4: And we think that experience of signing up for all
Speaker 4: these services should go away, and so we are making
Speaker 4: as where you don't need to do that, and paying
Speaker 4: via stable coins could be one way where you pay
Speaker 4: per web requester, you know, per individual use very small
Speaker 4: amounts and you don't have to go sign up for
Speaker 4: a whole bunch of different services.
Speaker 3: So I realized the agent to commerce is a spectrum
Speaker 3: of services, everything from just simply filling out a form
Speaker 3: to giving an agent a certain amount of wallet spend
Speaker 3: and saying, go off and figure out my life for
Speaker 3: me and spend the following on whatever. Everyone also likes
Speaker 3: to talk about bots going wild, right and going rogue,
Speaker 3: and so I imagine if you are giving an agent
Speaker 3: a certain amount of money and telling it to spend
Speaker 3: in a certain way instruction specificity can vary. But what
Speaker 3: happens if things go bad or what happens if you're
Speaker 3: dissatisfied with the choice that the agent makes? Whose fault
Speaker 3: is that? Like, where does the liability actually lie?
Speaker 4: I think this concern is quite overstated because one the
Speaker 4: agents can do a huge amount of useful work for
Speaker 4: you while there's still a human in the loop. And
Speaker 4: so imagineif claud code asks you are you okay if
Speaker 4: I spend this amount and you just have to hit enter.
Speaker 4: That's much better than the experience of signing up for
Speaker 4: a service and clicking around the webface and things like that.
Speaker 4: So you've still saved a huge amount of time, even
Speaker 4: if you're kind of reviewing the transaction. Similarly, again, in
Speaker 4: the consumer use case, the way we suggest people visualize
Speaker 4: agentic commerce is you still have a human in the
Speaker 4: loop deciding, making the final decision of both what thing
Speaker 4: I buy and am I okay spending this much money?
Speaker 4: But the AIS can still be hugely beneficial as part
Speaker 4: of your shopping journey, even if you're as a human
Speaker 4: signing off on that transaction. And then you get a
Speaker 4: bit into delegated authority. It's kind of like, you know,
Speaker 4: we run a you know at Stripe, a large company,
Speaker 4: and we spend dollars a year and there's lots of
Speaker 4: delegated authority. You might say, what if you have one
Speaker 4: crazy person who makes a bad spending decision and they
Speaker 4: occasionally have that, and you know, how do you solve
Speaker 4: it? It's like, I don't know, give people spending limits on
Speaker 4: how much they can spend, and you you know, whack
Speaker 4: them on the knuckles if they do something really crazy
Speaker 4: and you just solve it with kind of sensible limits
Speaker 4: and delegated authority and approval process. And it's kind of
Speaker 4: the same with an agent.
Speaker 2: Well, this gets me to a question that I wanted
Speaker 2: to ask about running a big company in the age
Speaker 2: of AI. Things are changing insanely fastly fast, fastly fast.
Speaker 2: Things are changing. Things are changing extremely fast. And there
Speaker 2: are certain things that people were excited about last year
Speaker 2: that didn't fizzle out in the same way, or certain
Speaker 2: things that people got really excited about even in December
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five that became the next hot thing for
Speaker 2: Stripe specifically or for a company. How do you think
Speaker 2: about say like, Okay, here's a thing that we want
Speaker 2: to exploit. Here's a moment, and we want to take
Speaker 2: advantage of it, and we're going to build the thing
Speaker 2: for this moment, versus is we want to allocate resources
Speaker 2: for anticipating what's going to be the thing twenty four
Speaker 2: months from now, explore where this is going. How do
Speaker 2: you think about the sort of resource allocation between exploring
Speaker 2: and exploiting in such a fast moving environment From the
Speaker 2: corporate standpoint.
Speaker 4: I would say you need to be very flexible because,
Speaker 4: as you're saying, if your information is three months out
Speaker 4: of date or six months out of dates, it's just
Speaker 4: woefully old. And so we try to be pretty flexible.
Speaker 4: And I know there's AI somehow brings out a desire
Speaker 4: for thought leadership in people. Every brand plants, but yeah,
Speaker 4: and just I don't know, like we have more questions
Speaker 4: and answers and we're trying to figure it out as
Speaker 4: we go through. So that's one. It's kind of having
Speaker 4: the right level of humility. The second thing is you
Speaker 4: kind of need to have the similarly, the right level
Speaker 4: of AI psychosis that the dose makes the poison, where
Speaker 4: you need to really believe in the capabilities of the models,
Speaker 4: but you also have to be willing to reason about
Speaker 4: the limits. And so to give you an example, really
Speaker 4: amazing at writing codes and huge productivity uplift there if
Speaker 4: you try to do anything. I don't know if you
Speaker 4: guys have tried to do anything like a financial analysis
Speaker 4: with the models. They're just horrible at numbers, numerous and
Speaker 4: they can kind of fool you because they can put
Speaker 4: together something that they can build a really nice spreadsheet,
Speaker 4: but you're like but the number is just go completely
Speaker 4: wrong halfway through the spreadsheet. Oh great, points, you're absolutely right,
Speaker 4: and so you need to have kind of a bit
Speaker 4: of a fingertip sense for what the models are good
Speaker 4: at versus bad at. I kind of think of this
Speaker 4: in you split up the company into the traditional you
Speaker 4: know this, R and D go to Marcus and GNA,
Speaker 4: and if you think about the different domains, they work
Speaker 4: quite differently. Within engineering, engineers have always been passionate about
Speaker 4: tools and better tools, and any kind of a half
Speaker 4: self respecting engineer is very eagerly adopting AI. You don't
Speaker 4: get too many laggards, and so we have seen a
Speaker 4: huge amount of adoption within software engineering at Stripe that's
Speaker 4: going really quickly. I don't think we're at the end
Speaker 4: of state, but we're pretty like that machine, I would say,
Speaker 4: is pretty well set up to be in this self
Speaker 4: improving loop because the people who are kind of doing
Speaker 4: the engineering day in day out also think about how
Speaker 4: can I better assmate this process, how can I use
Speaker 4: AI to make it work faster? And so a lot
Speaker 4: of bugs that are fixed at Stripe no one ever
Speaker 4: opens an editor for them. They just hit the fix
Speaker 4: this bug button in the interface, and that'sgentically, so that's
Speaker 4: software engineering on sales and kind of go to market.
Speaker 4: What helps you is that it is the most measurable
Speaker 4: domain inside of tech companies and companies broadly, and so
Speaker 4: you can reason about the specific productivity of a specific
Speaker 4: salesperson in a way that you can't with a software
Speaker 4: engineer or a lawyer or something where any kind of
Speaker 4: metrics there is very subject to Goodheart's law, whereas with
Speaker 4: good market it's measurable. And so we have seen at
Speaker 4: Stripe at least our sellers are super into AI. They're
Speaker 4: adopting it very eagerly. And you can't ascribe causality in
Speaker 4: the productivity numbers, but the productivity numbers are very good.
Speaker 4: The place where I think it's tricky is within the
Speaker 4: other general functions you think about legal and finance and
Speaker 4: risk and things like that, and there there is a
Speaker 4: lot of AI happening, but it's just tricky because one
Speaker 4: there's a huge amount of infrastructure work that needs to happen.
Speaker 4: It's like, okay, we actually have to get this financial
Speaker 4: data into a form where it's usable by the AIS,
Speaker 4: and we used to keep it under lock and key
Speaker 4: and now we need to kind of load it in
Speaker 4: a way that the AI can use. So we had
Speaker 4: a big infrastructure builded stripe to make the data usable
Speaker 4: to the AIS, but also kind of keep it locked
Speaker 4: down appropriately and things like that. And then, like I said,
Speaker 4: the AIS are just uneven in which domains they are
Speaker 4: good at. And so if it is a coding problem
Speaker 4: or if it could be turned into a coding problem,
Speaker 4: very good at that. The public tax code and the
Speaker 4: public legal code, they're very good at that because it's
Speaker 4: texts that they've been trained on. But working with I
Speaker 4: would say specific financial data stripe or kind of specific
Speaker 4: internal stuff that we have, that's just kind of harder
Speaker 4: to get good results out. It's not impossible, and the
Speaker 4: models will improve a lot, but I would say that
Speaker 4: is kind of the trickiest demain to get great results.
Speaker 3: So, just going back to the beginning of this conversation,
Speaker 3: we talked about how the Internet basically runs on commerce,
Speaker 3: and if the nature of that commerce is changing, you
Speaker 3: would expect some impact on the Internet. We've been asking
Speaker 3: you various questions about that, but I'm just gonna ask
Speaker 3: you very directly, what is your sort of broad vision
Speaker 3: of the Internet. In the world of agentic commerce.
Speaker 4: We're very excited for the intelligence explosion, and so in
Speaker 4: our pocket of the Internet, we are seeing much more
Speaker 4: entrepreneurship happening. That shows up in the numbers. So to
Speaker 4: give you a sense, new business creation on Stripe in
Speaker 4: Q one was up seventy one percent a year over year.
Speaker 4: That business generally is not growing back quickly. It's like
Speaker 4: the leading edge numbers are seeing much more business creation.
Speaker 4: You see this in other numbers too. So the app
Speaker 4: store like number of app launches was quite flat for
Speaker 4: many many years, and now it's seeing kind of similar
Speaker 4: growth to that, and so so there are going to
Speaker 4: be many, many fruits of the intelligence explosion. But we
Speaker 4: get quite excited about the idea that you have more
Speaker 4: people creating companies and maybe you get more dynamism. Right,
Speaker 4: we talked about some of the effects where you know
Speaker 4: you'll maybe see more price competition. If you work at
Speaker 4: a big company and you think, hey, the way we
Speaker 4: are doing this is really silly. I could do it
Speaker 4: so much better. The bar to you being able to
Speaker 4: quit the company and develop a competing better offering is
Speaker 4: now lower. Because you have more power available to you.
Speaker 4: You can recruit the intelligence that's available to you, and
Speaker 4: so our prediction is that you get more economic dynamism,
Speaker 4: which we're already seeing in our leading edge numbers. You know,
Speaker 4: we're seeing more startup formation. But we talked about this
Speaker 4: about stripe sessions, you know, kind of an Ecocian sense.
Speaker 4: Maybe you see smaller firms and more of them because
Speaker 4: it's easier for them to coordinate.
Speaker 2: To gentlemen, John, I have like a million more questions
Speaker 2: for you, but I'm aware of the time, so let's
Speaker 2: just leave it there. This was such a We really
Speaker 2: enjoyed getting the chance to talk and would love to
Speaker 2: have you back some time. Absolutely, Tracy, I really thought
Speaker 2: that conversation was super interesting.
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 2: I mean, just to start, there's a lot here. This
Speaker 2: is a big deal. I think we where it's gonna go,
Speaker 2: the question of whether just commerce directly, and then also
Speaker 2: your question of the Internet more broadly. There's some pretty
Speaker 2: big questions and big implications from which way some of
Speaker 2: this stuff unfolds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'm glad that John appreciates the enjoyability of
Speaker 3: the human Yeah. Well, yes, I do have questions about
Speaker 3: I guess discoverability when it comes to agents so everyone
Speaker 3: by now knows. The example of you go on Netflix
Speaker 3: the first video or movie TV series you ever watched
Speaker 3: is incredibly important because algorithms sort of builds itself around
Speaker 3: that one choice, and if you watch something stupid, then
Speaker 3: forever and ever, it's gonna like yeah, yeah, yeah, has
Speaker 3: this one demographic. So there is a tendency for algos
Speaker 3: to sort of cluster among like recognizable patterns, so it
Speaker 3: becomes harder to discover new things, new products. I will
Speaker 3: say some algos obviously do it better than others. YouTube's
Speaker 3: algorithm I find like actually really phenomenal for resurfacing or
Speaker 3: for surfacing new things.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 2: Within LLLMS itself, I find memory to be a very
Speaker 2: double edged sword, which is on some level, I do
Speaker 2: think it's more useful when it knows a little bit
Speaker 2: about the context of the user. Yeah, but there be
Speaker 2: times when will shoehorn any like you did a query
Speaker 2: six months ago, and I will try to bring it
Speaker 2: back around to that. I think there's a lot there.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot there with the future of advertising. Yeah,
Speaker 2: just setting aside, what is the equivalent of SEO in
Speaker 2: the LLLM, we should probably do an episode from the
Speaker 2: perspective of retailers that are really having to think about
Speaker 2: how they surface within.
Speaker 3: Totally, so that that in itself is a huge shift
Speaker 3: if you're a retailer and now you're trying to target
Speaker 3: bots as well as humans. And then the overall question
Speaker 3: of what happens to the Internet in this new world,
Speaker 3: Like I tend to be very cynical about the overall
Speaker 3: direction of the Internet and just assume that every new
Speaker 3: advance in technology is going to make it worse, but
Speaker 3: like you could see a future where the ability to
Speaker 3: do seamless micro transactions basically means that like everyone starts
Speaker 3: charging for their content for their APIs, and so you
Speaker 3: actually have to pay a fee to be on the Internet.
Speaker 2: This is what I mean, Like the end of freeism,
Speaker 2: I think is an interesting question. I also just personally,
Speaker 2: I find it very validating that, like I'm not crazy
Speaker 2: that actually, like being able to do something at a
Speaker 2: dome like buying a domain name is something that people
Speaker 2: other people thought needed to be solved, you know what
Speaker 2: I'm saying, So like some of these things seem very special.
Speaker 2: That stripe and now it's in the last couple of
Speaker 2: weeks related to both the may name question the related
Speaker 2: to being able to pay an API directly rather than
Speaker 2: go to a website and enter your credit card and
Speaker 2: stuff like that for credits or whatever. I found these
Speaker 2: things to be very annoying and big deals, and I'm
Speaker 2: sort of glad that I feel less crazy, like, actually,
Speaker 2: these are annoying things within the new contemporary landscape.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And speaking of annoying things, I also feel like
Speaker 3: a big chunk of the future is going to be bots,
Speaker 3: just like negotiating with each other. And I've already heard
Speaker 3: in the insurance sphere. You know, you've heard of insurers
Speaker 3: using AI to like bulk deny claims, right, and then
Speaker 3: I've heard of new AI startups or existing companies using
Speaker 3: AI to contest the insurers, yeah, pushback. And so it
Speaker 3: just feels like it's just going to be bots.
Speaker 2: Like the only money makers are going to be chip
Speaker 2: companies in Korea because there everyone's going to be having
Speaker 2: to get more powerful chips, and old bloomer landlords in
Speaker 2: San Francisco because the employees of AI and Anthropic need
Speaker 2: a place to live and healthcare.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 2: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the Oudlots podcast. I'm
Speaker 3: Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 2: Follow our guest John Collison, He's at Collision. Follow our
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