Agentic opportunity: OpenAI and Stripe build for rising tide of new entrepreneurial firms

In corporate parlance, any metric on a chart that shows rapid, significant growth over a short period of time is known as a “hockey stick.” On Wednesday, Stripe Inc. Chief Executive Patrick Collison shared a slide at his firm’s annual conference that looked like a promotional poster for the National Hockey League.

The data reported by payments platform vendor Stripe, a privately held company, reflected the sharp rise in new companies using Stripe’s transaction tools and services. Since the start of this year, and particularly in recent weeks, Stripe has noticed what Collison referred to as a “parabolic rise” in new firm creation.

“Something as far as we can tell really has changed over the last couple of months,” said Collison, during his keynote speech at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco. “Because of AI, the entire economy is re-platforming.”

OpenAI as infrastructure provider

This economic shift is being partly fueled by the ease and availability of artificial intelligence tools for coding. The meteoric adoption of solutions such as Anthropic PBC’s Claude Code and OpenAI Group PBC’s Codex, coupled with advances in large language model capabilities, have fostered startup growth at a scale that even surprised the co-founder of OpenAI.

“It does feel like we’re on somewhat of a takeoff,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in conversation with Collison during a conference session Wednesday. “I do think the models got really good, especially for coding, but also in general late last year. There has just been this tidal wave of people coming into Codex recently. A lot happens very fast.”

OpenAI has been on an accelerated path towards acquiring data center infrastructure and the company has committed to purchasing $600 billion worth of data center capacity. This sizable sum is in keeping with OpenAI’s goal to become the platform on which AI gets built, a strategy that Altman reinforced in his comments at Stripe Sessions.

“Now we have to figure out how to build this mega, mega token factory for the world,” Altman said. “I would like us to be an infrastructure provider. If we can provide a utility and people can build on top of that utility…I think that would be quite powerful.”

OpenAI’s quest for data center capacity has become a topic of conversation in recent weeks, fueled by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s stated plans to place data centers into orbit around the Earth. Coincidentally, Altman and his co-founder Greg Brockman have been spending time with Musk in an Oakland courtroom this week to defend themselves against a lawsuit from the SpaceX executive who claimed that OpenAI abandoned its founding promise to remain a non-profit.

On Wednesday, Altman expressed skepticism about Musk’s space-based data center plan. “Good luck with that,” Altman said. “I don’t even think he’s that serious about it.”

Agents move into payments

While OpenAI’s future role in the burgeoning AI economy is still being defined, financial service companies such as Stripe are rapidly deploying new services to support agentic commerce. The ability for AI agents to make and receive payments is poised to transform software-driven financial transactions.

This week, Stripe unveiled a new way for AI agents to process payments through Link, a digital wallet and checkout service. The company also launched enhancements to its agentic commerce platform that facilitated microtransactions and sales through a customer’s product catalog.

Other major tech firms are not ignoring the fast-moving field of agentic commerce. Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. formed agreements with Stripe last fall, and on Wednesday the payments company launched a collaboration with Google LLC to enable product purchases through the Gemini app. The company also recently announced a partnership with Meta to enable native checkout inside ads on Facebook.

The role of agents in the buying and selling of goods and services represents a new chapter in the future direction of the internet as well, according to Shan Aggarwal, chief business officer at Coinbase Global Inc.

“In the future, the internet will be a programmable marketplace for agents,” said Aggarwal, during a presentation at Stripe Sessions. “Intents are the new interface, you express an intent and the agent figures it out for you. You can embed the payment in the intent resolution. They will be the core drivers of the internet economy.”

Buyers as ruthless optimizers

There was a clear sense at Stripe Sessions this week that adoption of agentic commerce solutions will dramatically reshape the notion of buyer and seller.

When agents become customers, the concept of brand loyalty or bundling products to entice buyers suddenly doesn’t matter anymore. Agents are looking for a specific product at the best price, regardless of how many times it has purchased from a particular supplier in the past.

“Agents are rational and ruthless optimizers,” Aggarwal noted. “It’s primarily based on what is the lowest cost, the most efficient service.”

E-commerce platforms are facing a profound change as well. When an AI agent comes calling online, the e-commerce seller needs to be able to authenticate the inquiry, quote a dynamic price and provide suitable payment guardrails.

“Agentic commerce is powering a technology that is becoming less of a moment and more of a policy,” said Danny Smith, Global Solutions Architect Lead at Stripe, in a conference session on Thursday. “Agents reason, but code actually pays.”

There is evidence that the agentic wave is moving into the global economy at warp speed. According to Kalyani Koppisetti of Amazon Web Services Inc., 51% of all web traffic is now automated, growing eight times faster than human clicks. Data points such as these provide yet another reminder of how rapidly AI is changing the world.

“Twelve months ago, this space had nothing,” Koppisetti said. “For the first time in history we now have agents surpassing humans in web site traffic.”

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE