The news: Stripe recapped its 2025 achievements and noted its aspirations for agentic commerce in its most recent annual letter.

• Stripe hit $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% YoY.
• Volume on Bridge, Stripe’s stablecoin orchestration platform, quadrupled YoY.
• Link, Stripe’s digital wallet, attracted over 200 million users since its inception. 

Stripe’s take on agentic commerce: Stripe is enthusiastic about AI’s payment capabilities but tempered its expectations for users. 

Specifically, the fintech believes that AI-backed commerce can only currently service customers in two ways: eliminating web forms through autofill and replacing Google search discovery with descriptive AI prompts. 

Agentic commerce has yet to mature into new operational stages for consumers, such as long-term memory of a shoppers’ preferences that forgoes the need for customers to remind an AI platform of purchase parameters. 

Stripe anticipates this agentic shopping journey to evolve further, with agentic platforms remembering consumer preferences and controlling the purchases. Customers will choose to trust their agents to buy on their behalf—which is what most consider “true” agentic commerce.

The final stage in Stripe’s eye is promptless agentic purchases, with AI agents so embedded into shoppers’ lives that it anticipates orders needed for their households, and simply sends notifications of completed purchases.

Implications for agentic providers: Realistically admitting the capability of AI-platform-driven ecommerce for consumers as it develops can help build trust in the technology. Full-on agentic commerce won’t drive the lion’s share of AI-platform based ecommerce anytime soon: This year, 95% ecommerce sales driven by AI-platforms will be completed off the AI platform and on the merchant sites, per our forecasts. 

Letting shoppers adjust to these new platforms as they develop more complex capabilities builds consumer confidence in AI to let the technology control more of their shopping experiences.