At Stripe Sessions, we showed how we think agentic commerce will often happen behind the scenes in the course of producing other final products. Here, we show our Claude Code using MPP and @tempo to buy a dataset from @alpha_vantage in the process of generating a research report for me on AI energy usage.
We've been thinking a lot at Stripe about the Coasean lens on AI:
- The obvious near-term effect is reduced transaction costs within companies: shared context, systems of record, aligned incentives etc.
- But inter-company transaction costs also reduce sharply: agents are great at discovery, make it trivially easy to integrate; make contracting much more straightforward; agent-to-agent commerce.
- On net, we think second effect bigger in medium term: fewer people per firm, more output per firm, just more firms, and more coordination happening through market-like mechanisms