Yesterday, I attended a build day event at Stripe’s NYC office. I saw a bunch of demos and met many interesting people, but two demos really stuck out: Agentic Commerce and Stablecoins.
First, agentic commerce. Stripe and OpenAI developed a new protocol called the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). ACP is an open standard that lets AI agents facilitate purchases on behalf of users, directly inside AI interfaces instead of pushing people out to external websites. ACP is designed so businesses keep customer relationships, pricing control, and fulfillment ownership.
It’s just integrated into chatGPT for now, but the real potential shows up when you imagine agents transacting across merchants. You tell your AI, “plan a Tokyo trip,” and it coordinates flights, hotels, restaurants, and activities across dozens of merchants in one conversation and one checkout. This is all enabled with more personalization. Your AI agent will soon know your calendar, budget, history, preferences, and constraints. It doesn’t just find what you asked for. It finds what you actually need.
On the business side, imagine a small e-commerce brand where an AI agent handles all the boring procurement work, reordering packaging when stock gets low, finding backup suppliers , negotiating bulk discounts across vendors. The owner focuses on product and customers while the agent handles the operational grind.
Another demo was about Stablecoins.
Stripe launched stablecoin payments about a year ago, and adoption has been strong among AI companies with global revenue. The top AI companies on Stripe generate roughly 60% of revenue outside the US, which makes cross-border payments a constant headache. Traditional international payments are slow, expensive, and failure-prone. Stablecoins settle in seconds instead of days, cost meaningfully less to process, and avoid failures tied to bank routing or currency conversion. For software companies, that directly translates to higher conversion and lower payment loss. Interestingly, Stripe is developing their own blockchain called Tempo, which is specifically designed for payments at scale. Once that is launched, working with stablecoins will be even more seamless.
What gets really interesting is combining these two layers.
ACP handles commerce orchestration: discovery, negotiation, and multi-merchant transactions. Stablecoins handle money movement: instant, global settlement at low cost.
Together, they remove two major friction points in global commerce: coordinating multi-party purchases and moving money quickly and cheaply. The result is an agent that can buy from anyone and pay anyone, anywhere, almost instantly. Stripe is building rails for AI-native, global-first commerce.
PS. thanks for the books, Stripe Press
Super interesting read!