Stripe broadens the connection between AI shopping and payments

• Key insight: Stripe has partnered with Constructor in an effort to improve discoverability for AI agents. 
• What's at stake: Consumers are warming to agentic commerce, pressuring merchants to improve payment experience. 
• Expert quote: "Agentic commerce is really about two separate things. How do AI agents find the product? And then how do they pay?" —Constructor executive Kevin Laymoun 

With AI agents infiltrating shopping and commerce, payment firms are lining up to offer technology that makes it easier for bots to locate and buy products with little or no human intervention. Constructor, an AI search company, has partnered with Stripe to find and buy products inside a single human "conversation" with an AI agent. Branded "Agentic Checkout," it's an attempt to bridge AI agents, merchants' product menus and the point of sale, which are all still largely distinct functions in the early days of agentic AI.

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"Agentic commerce is really about two separate things. How do AI agents find the product? And then how do they pay?" Kevin Laymoun, chief revenue and customer officer at Constructor, told American Banker.

Explorers

Constructor and Stripe are collaborating on what's called discoverability, or technology that a merchant uses to enable AI agents to find their products. Payment companies such as Klarna and banks such as JPMorganChase are also amassing discovery tools for merchant clients that are relying more on AI to draw consumers.

Stripe, which would not comment for this article, has also worked on other AI discoverability projects, and Constructor did not rule out working with other partners in the payments or banking industries. 

Constructor's technology includes what it calls a "reasoning engine," which agents use to learn from each shopper's behavior across a retailer's channels to provide relevant recommendations. Stripe adds payment options, including Link – which has more than 250 million users – to Constructor's agents. 

Through Constructor, shoppers ask questions such as "What should I wear to an outdoor fall wedding?"or "Can you help me plan quick, healthy dinners for my family this week?" and receive in-stock recommendations. Shoppers then decide on recommendations and checkout with Stripe. 

Waiting to be discovered

The promise of agentic commerce is causing a shift in merchant priorities from enabling transactions via live chat to AI discoverability. There's a growing market of firms such as Freedomics and Constructor and others that are selling discoverability tools. 

Andras Cser, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, said technology firms such as Aembit, Astrix/Cisco, CrowdStrike, Noma Security, Palo Alto Networks and Zenity are also active in AI agent discovery, creating a large market of options. 

"Payment companies don't get into the business of helping consumers find a product, but they want to be there once that product is spotted and the consumer is ready to buy," Constructor's Laymoun said, adding the same pressure to execute checkout without friction on a traditional e-commerce site also applies to agentic shopping.  

The question is whether merchants will ease some control over their own shopping technology to outside AI models. As agents begin helping customers find goods and services, retailers can't afford to treat them as malicious bots and simply block them, according to Zil Bareisis, director of banking and payments at Celent. 

"Instead, they must recognize legitimate agents and make their products discoverable to them," Bareisis told American Banker. "This is the first step in agentic commerce, which is rapidly gaining traction in the market, and many retailers will need help from specialist providers in this space."

Work has been underway on agent discoverability for a couple of years, but is taking on added urgency as consumers embrace new forms of AI, along with heightened expectations of what agentic AI can do.

A research report from Walmart found that consumers now trust AI-powered product recommendations as much as human influencers. Consumers also expect AI to make the entire shopping experience easier. "This new shopping experience must be seamless. Shoppers are quick to disengage when relevance or simplicity falters," Walmart's research reports. 

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AI also equals speed, at least in the minds of consumers, according to Walmart. Twenty two percent of cart abandonment is attributable to slow checkout speed, according to research site Sellers Commerce."If you take too long shoppers are going to bounce," Laymoun said.