Stripe Global Agentic Commerce Solutions Lead Danny Smith: The Rise of Personal Agents Powered by Link Wallet, WebMCP and More!

Link Wallet for Agents. So if you go to link.com slash agents, beautiful like one pager that it describes and you can basically add this wallet. It's basically a CLI for Link. So if you want to use like your Claude or any agent, it's a skill that you can train your agent to basically say you now have the ability to accept payments, but in a guarded and secure manner. Welcome to the Retailgentic Podcast, where we explore the intersection of retail, e-commerce and AI agents, which we call Retailgenic. Our mission is simple. We are shining a bright light on the new agentic AI shopping mega trend, which will disrupt the trillion dollar digital retail market. The stakes are high. Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Anthropic are all fighting to be the consumer AI shopping agent winner. There are going to be some tough decisions for online brands and retailers to make. What happens to checkout? How should payments work? Should you continue to invest in retail media networks? What does the world look like when over half of your traffic is not from humans, but from AI agents? These existential questions are the tip of the iceberg. On this podcast, we're talking to industry experts, analysts and influencers to get answers to these questions, identify trends and best practices. This is Retailgentic, your podcast partner in navigating our AI shopping agent future. And now here's your host, Scott Wingo. Welcome to this episode of Retailgentic. I'm your host, Scott Wingo. Today, we are still live day two. It's Thursday from Retail Club here in beautiful Huntington Beach. It's a little overcast, which we actually are enjoying. I'll take it. We were baking yesterday, so we appreciate the overcast that they dialed in for the show. Joining us today is a special guest. He is from a little payments company called Stripe. It's Danny Smith and he is the global agentic commerce solutions lead. You have agentic commerce in your title. High five. I love it. High five to you. Yeah. I'm a agentic commerce maximalist, so you're my people. Oh my goodness. You are my people. Sure. Agentic commerce. I love that. Yeah. Jaime Sorgente, who sadly couldn't be here, he gave me that title. So I've embraced it. Weirdly, in the same article, he gave me the title of jerk. I don't know what that was all about. But, so Danny, tell us about your career before Stripe and then let's roll right into what it is you do at Stripe as the director of global agentic commerce solutions. Yeah, I have a bit of a weird background. Like I'm probably one of the few people that had no payments background part of Stripe. I was a cloud architect. I worked with AWS. I was at ServiceNow prior to Stripe. And it's just been one of those journeys where it's like I understood like how to work with like APIs and build clouds and things. Payments to me was always like a black box. Like, to me it was just like a PayPal button that you just put on a website and like you just click the button and it's supposed to work, right? Yeah. I was a cloud architect. But, a lot of really, really smart people that I knew were going to Stripe. Including like my VP that was at ServiceNow. He went over and started a brand new practice at Stripe with our partner ecosystem. So, I came into Stripe as a partner solutions architect. So, working with companies helping, you know, the partners go to market. And I ran the AWS partnership. Yeah. And one of the first projects I got put on with AWS was something that we called Rufus. Before it's now like Alexa for shopping. So, I was working with the team that was adding the payments layer to Rufus. Wait, you named your payments layer after Jeff Bezos' dog? Was it Bezos' dog? So, I mean, okay, there's a lot of lore around Rufus. So, I was told by AWS it was the first dog that was allowed on the AWS campus. I did not get the Bezos connection. I think it was McKenzie and Jeff's dog that used to come to the office. Okay, well that, I mean... I know it's a corgi. That checks out. If it's the first dog allowed on campus, it probably needs to be Bezos' dog, right? Yeah, there's probably a factual thing there, yeah. So, I'm working on that project and I had the privilege of taking the stage with AWS at Stripe Sessions three years ago. So, to talk about agentic commerce, but more from like an on-site shopping experience. Yeah. Like the same thing that Rufus was doing and then Walmart launched Sparky not long after. So, agentic commerce back then was like, how can I have an agentic experience on my actual website? Yep. A shopper agent type situation. Exactly. And so, that got me exposed to that. And so, when we launched agentic commerce at Stripe, which was in October of 2025, they reached out and said, who in the company has experience like with technical go-to-market with agentic commerce? And I happen to be one of the people because I worked with AWS. Yeah. So, I just… That's the solutions in your title. Correct. Yeah. You help deploy, you're not building the product, you're helping people. No, I'm not in engineering. I'm literally like a technical go-to-market, basically like a pre-sales technical go-to-market person. Yeah, I got it. Cool. But yeah, that got me exposed to agentic commerce and I jumped at the chance to take this role because every retailer on planet Earth was reaching out to us all of a sudden. We had all this inbound that we didn't anticipate when we launched the first agentic commerce protocol. Retailers that traditionally weren't necessarily reaching out to Stripe. Yeah. You know, the big box. Yeah. Retailers. And so, there was so much demand. We all had to hit the road and go out and meet the customer like where they were and explain to them like how we can help them launch on this exciting new channel. Got it. So, that was my role and basically how I got there. I very much admire you guys because I'm super old and I've been around from the very beginning of economy. Like literally when card not present transactions were illegal. Yeah. What? Oh, yeah. And so, like we had to figure out standards for that. And then, I mean, there was an era of my career where tokenization was the amazing new thing. And I very distinctly remember when Stripe came onto the stream scene because prior to you, every payments company was focused on making a value prop to a merchant, to a business owner. And to be honest, Stripe started out making a value proposition to a developer. Developers. Exactly. And so, it was kind of this engineering centric solution that opened like very clearly one. Like in like. And so, now a lot of the things we're struggling to invent with agentic commerce feel similar to me to previous generations of payments. But now I chuckle because you guys, you're still very developer centric, but now you kind of are a clear incumbent in the payment space. And so, I'm curious, like, do you, like, are you finding it adoption easier? Are you finding that, like, are there new Stripes that you're competing with that are, you know, small engineering centric payment companies? Oh, wow. That was a long question. Sorry. No. My, I mean, I'll give you hopefully a short answer, which is Stripe is very developer friendly. Like, it's been weird. Like, I'll go to conferences and I'll have people pull me aside and basically say, can I take my picture with you? Your API changed my life. Yeah. Like a developer saying, like, your documentation and your API changed my life. I'm not making that up. Yeah. And so, like, I don't, I haven't seen a lot of competition from, we're really strong in, like, the startup layer. And our founders always say, let's win all startups and then let's go win them again. Yeah. So, we're, I mean, we're very focused on, if you go on YouTube and any, like, vibe coding platform or podcast or show on YouTube about building a business, step one, open your Stripe account. Step two, go vibe code whatever it is, the SaaS, you know, application. So, it's always like, we're kind of baked in to that methodology. So, I think we're doing really well at the startup layer. What we're trying to do is actually embrace the enterprise layer. Yeah. And come down and that's actually way more challenging because doing, changing payments at an enterprise company is like open heart surgery. Yeah. Like, it's literally like how you move money at. So, we've hit some challenges there, but, you know, we embrace the challenge. That's what we, what I love about being at Stripe is that. It's not just open heart surgery. It's open heart surgery while you're running a marathon. Yeah. Very true. One thing I wanted to ask you about, a big topic of the show here is where Meta just had a big day yesterday and they've launched Muse, which is quite popular. Yep. And I was using it for the first time the day they launched and it had a very new experience. And I've used Stripe link before in the context of the website where it's kind of like it recognizes me and it says, welcome back. Do you want to log in with your link account? Yep. And, but here, you know, I was using Muse to shop for something. It walked me right up to the purchase and then right in the conversation it said, if you click this link, link, Stripe link, link, and log in, it will authorize the permissions. Yes. And then I used Instinct and did the same thing. Yeah. So it's like overnight, you guys, and it feels like a different offering because when I click on that link, it gives me this really nice, almost like one page checkout confirm. It's like the agent's telling me that you will intend to buy this. It's this price. The shipping is this. It's like very detailed. And then it's like says, does, do you confirm? Um, uh, is that a new offering? Like, or has that always been there and I never seen it used that way? Walk. No. Yeah. It has not always been there. Um, it's fairly new where it's three or four months. Uh, so that's old and agentic commerce. It's called like link. I want to make sure I call it. Is it link checkout or link wallet for agents? Um, so if you go to link.com slash agents, beautiful, like one pager that it describes, and you can basically add this wallet. It's, it's basically a CLI for link. So if you want to use like your Claude or any, any agent, it's, it's a skill that you can train your agent to basically say, you now have the ability to accept payments, but in a guarded and secure manner. Yeah. Um, and so Muse, um, was a project that was named hatch internally at, at meta for, for a while. They reached out to the kinds of solutions you work on. So people call you and say, we need to, you know, we need to, I got scrambled on a Saturday to, uh, work on this project all weekend. Yeah. Cause basically our founders reached out and said, yeah, meta has a team working on this all weekend. So we expect you guys to match that level of dedication. Yeah. And I'm like, awesome. Cause it's like, so. And they're hanging out in a pub while you guys are doing the, they're having a cheeky pint while you guys are working on it. I, yes. I love the pub is on Mark Zuckerberg's Island. Yeah. That pub is actually a studio in our, uh, strike pod. Yes. It's on my next time. I'm going to, I'm going to swing by and, uh, you should tap you. I want to go visit the set. It's a really good set. At Oyster Point. Yeah. You should definitely come by. There's all kinds of like, is there swag? I need cheeky point swag. There is cheeky points. Okay. Right. I'm in. Um, but yeah, so link is the link wallet for agents is something that we've, uh, it's, it's a concept, right? Basically teach your agent how to accept payments in a secure way. So it's a skill. So link.com slash agents. You can basically go read, read your skill in. It's very easy. You basically just tell your agent, like, I need you to learn this skill. And so that's what Meta wanted is like, they wanted a secure way of when you're powering the muse checkout experience that they didn't want to worry about like developing like wallet technology and things like that. So that's why they reached out to us. Got it. Very cool. Are there other agents using it that, you know, yeah. A lot on the way. Grok bot. Yeah. So Grok bot uses it as well. Um, and again, we're agent agnostic. So like any agent can train on the link skill. Yeah. So I've used it with Claude. Um, so yeah, but the major press worthy had been Grok bot muse and, um, instinct. Yeah. I don't want you to get in trouble, but are there, you have visibility into a pipeline. Are there a lot of these things? It feels like there's a lot. This can't possibly be the first and there's no, there's a lot. I mean, and, and, and again, we're very like transparent about like anyone can add this skill. So if you're building your own Hermes agent at home or open call. Yeah. But you get calls from the big guys that really big. So there's probably a lot on the way. Possibly. Is it like, to me, the, that link standard, it, um, it almost feels like a digital wallet redo in the sense that like, if you think about Muse right now, uh, there's three bifurcated consumer experiences. Uh, if you're shopping for something on Muse that's sold by a Shopify merchant, there's one, uh, checkout flow that I would argue is pretty low friction. If you are, uh, uh, shopping for a merchant, uh, that works with the, the, um, Stripe link, um, there's a, like, frankly, awesome low friction, uh, checkout experience. If you're shopping with a merchant that isn't in one of those two ecosystems, it kind of sucks. Um, and the problem I see is like the consumer doesn't necessarily know in advance. I mean, no consumer knows who's running Shopify and you know, I don't, but the link thing works everywhere. Like I've used it. So, so I think I've used it at like Best Buy, who I don't think is a Stripe, you know, I've used it places where link is not available on the checkout. Yeah. So how does it work? Is it, is it injecting a one time use card downstream? Yes. It's, it's generating a virtual car in the background that's, um, that's gated. So she knows the story. I, when we first launched a gentic, uh, shared payment tokens. So link is actually generated a token in the background. That's basically context wrapping around your tokenized payment method. Yep. And it's preventing the agent from hallucinating. And, um, I, I tell this story a lot, but like I was first experimenting with a gentic commerce early, early days. I won't name the agent, but this is like three, almost three years ago. Yeah. And we were generating share payment tokens and we were testing them. And I made the really dumb decision to say, buy me a model airplane. Yeah. And here's your, and it hallucinated and tried to buy a real airplane. And it was, I saw these zeros come across the screen and like my, you know, my life lasts before my eyes. Like this is it. My bank account is going to be drained to buy an airplane. But thank goodness that it was a tokenized experience because literally what happens is the agent cannot spend more than the budgeted amount that we put in to the actual token. Yeah. So if I say spend $15 on this model airplane, it can't hallucinate and spend $15. Well, it could, it would just have to buy a really janky airplane. Right. Yeah. I'm just like, there's no airplane that I can afford. So, but, so that's kind of like the context wrapping that we put around these experiences. And so it was, I think the world's first agentic token, uh, when we launched with, uh, OpenAI and Etsy was our first merchant. And that's been powering those, those experiences ever since. Yeah. So, you know, if you use link and you train your wallet, uh, your agent with the wallet that you have a bounded virtual card that can only be used once. And it's only for the budgeted amount. Yeah. So the merchant doesn't have to accept it. Right. And so, yeah, your question about how does it work? So there, there's two ways it can work, right? One is it's going to take, we're basically relying on the agent to use browser automation and web scraping to go figure out a human checkout. So the challenge is how does a, an agent figure out a human readable checkout? They're actually really not that good at it currently. They're getting better. Um, they're getting better, but what we released this week, interestingly, is something called Stripe checkout for agents. Yep. So it's powered by something, uh, called web MCP. If you guys are familiar with that. Um, yeah, again, fairly new protocol. There's some adoption going on, but it's basically a way of making a human readable checkout machine readable in parallel. So you don't have to do anything. If you're a Stripe merchant, if you're using one of our optimized checkout suite, uh, surfaces like Stripe, uh, hosted invoices or Stripe hosted checkout, the agent readiness is already built in. Hmm. So that's something that we launched this week on actually on Monday. Oh, cool. So then those are two sides of the same coin though. The, the, the link is something the agent would use to initiate a transaction. Right. And the, the Stripe checkout for agents is something a merchant would use to be more agent friendly. That's right. Now I try to add value on both sides. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's our mission. Definitely. Well, congratulations. Yeah. I mean, so far so good, right? I mean, we launched it on Monday and it's, it's exciting. All of our merchants are excited because they don't have to do anything. It's like, it's already like if they're using one of our hosted checkout surfaces, it's already built into the experience. Yeah. And then, uh, one of the earlier things you guys released was agent studio, which is a set of other services for merchants. Uh, imagine that's, that's a, on the product side, that's not in your purview, but you probably help. Oh no. Agent builders or do you help merchants with things as well? Yeah, I know it's officially called agentic commerce suite ACS. That's right. Yeah. Um, and, uh, yeah, I was heavily involved in that. And basically that's how we're working with merchants to bring their product catalog data. And this is where you guys come in, right? Because you can refine product catalog data. You do a lot of refinement, AEO, GEO things that we don't do. Yep. So Stripe is not playing in that space. We're taking that product catalog data and we're just bringing it to the open AIs of the world, the, um, Gemini's of the world, but in an unrefined manner. Yeah. So we're just, we're, yeah, exactly. We're distribution layer and we're trying to make sure that your protocol compliant. So that's how we're powering things like instant checkout on Gemini, which we're launching with a couple of merchants fairly soon. Uh, a couple of them are already live in like an alpha, like pilot stage, but you'll see an official announcement from Google coming fairly soon, probably late October. Yeah. But, um, and we, we started with instant checkout with opening eye and they've since pivoted more to like focused on discovery. So we've had a lot of good success with taking the product catalog, bringing it directly to the agents and then having the checkout be a punch out that goes back to your website. Yeah. And so we've had some merchants actually tell us they've doubled their web traffic in like the last three or four months because the agents now have the product catalog more easily accessible. Yeah. The closer you get that product catalog and that data to the agent, the less web scraping they have to do, the less tokens they have to burn. And agents don't want to burn tokens either. I mean, that costs them money on the backend as far as like any type of web, uh, scraping or browser automation is a very costly endeavor for an agent. Yeah. Uh, just backtracking for half a sec. Cause my brain spinning now that I'm understanding all of this better. If I am a Stripe merchant that uses you as my, my payment processor, do I get the agent commerce or I'm sorry, the, the Stripe checkout for agents? Does that like automatically get enabled? As long as you're using one of our, uh, uh, optimized checkout suite hosted services. So if you've built like a custom bespoke, like using just the API, then we will have to work with you to like migrate you over. Yeah. But I'm using one of your out of the box. Correct. Yes, sir. Yeah. Correct. If you're using one of those that is out of the box. Um, yeah, I'll send you guys like, there's a whole blog write up that we published on Monday morning. Um, that walks through the whole experience. There's actually a built in demo on the blog that's showing you what's what an agent interaction looks like on like a human checkout. There's all these extra calls that are happening because the way, the way web MCP works is instead of you get an agent guessing on how do I thought this form? How do I like, you know, go around? It's basically making tool calls. Yeah. And agents work on tool calls. And what we've seen. API is your API. And so some initial statistics, I'm going to try to remember these numbers. I said them yesterday, 42% less tokens burned by an agent when he's trying to check out using Stripe checkout for agents. 38% less tool calls and 39% efficiency as far as like the faster checkout. And that's really important to an agent because agents are brutally honest shoppers. Like three seconds is annoying to a human. Like 800 milliseconds is beyond annoying to an agent. Yes. And it'll just, it'll just move on. Yeah. Yeah. And so we were laser focused on like making sure that this web MCP hook is very efficient for the agent. Got it. Yeah. So we spent a lot of time talking about these super ancient things that you launched from like Monday. What have you done lately? Yeah. Like what have you done this week or more seriously though? So what are, is there anything that we should be looking forward to? Like in your mind, are there, are there significant points of friction in the whole agentic commerce experience that? Yeah, there are. I mean, I'll tell another story. So like with my muse agent, I was at a conference last week in San Francisco. A friend of mine walked in and he's wearing this amazing like leather jacket. And I'm like, I need that Jack. So I took a picture of it and I had my instinct and muse agents both go shopping. Cause I'm like, I don't want to shop for this. I like to compete them. I like to compare them too. Yeah. And so I like, yeah, let's see who wins. Right. I find different. Are you guys just growing tokens out of your ears? They're all free right now. I know. You're using VC tokens. I mean, I love subsidized token consumption. I mean, why I have one when you can have two, right? So they're, they're out there shopping. Both of them got blocked by every single retailer. They found the jacket. Again, I had authorized the purchase. So there's a difference between authorization and actually transaction. Yeah. Yeah. That's the challenge that we're facing right now is the merchant adoption of, um, being able to allow these agents to come through the front door to actually complete the purchase. Yeah. That's the biggest challenge. And we're working on this by the way. I talk to them all the time. Half do it on purpose. Other half don't realize they're doing it. The CEO say, why are we not doing more? And we'll dig into it and we'll say, well, you're, I was a high agents. Exactly. I was a high intent shopper. I had authorized the purchase. I knew exactly what I wanted and I got rejected at the front door. And these were some major retailers, uh, that were rejecting me. So I still don't have that jacket. Yeah. And it is like if you convert this to a real world analogy and say, wait a minute, I hired a personal shopper to go to Nordstrom's and buy me a leather jacket and your security guard wouldn't let them in. I always call it the doorman versus the bouncer scenario. Like we're, uh, most of these merchants are bouncers. They have, they're bouncing all bot traffic, which by the way is the majority of traffic on the internet. Yep. As of like 2024, it was 53%. And now this is 2026. I, I heard 98% of those are now, uh, refi buy bots, but that's a, uh, under advisement of counsel. I, he's baiting. I love it. Um, yeah. So the, so the way I like to put it is your highest intent enterprise shopper may be getting blocked to your point at the front door. And so we're working on that, you know, but again, stripes more on the backend powering to check out, but we are working on some potential protocols that can help like identify good bot versus bad bot. Because that's the number one challenge to, to, to address your question is I, I still don't have that jacket. So that's a problem. Yeah. Cause on your side, you know, Stripe knows so much that this is real. There's a token. It's been authorized by the user. I'm a high intent. The conversation is over transactions. Right there. The conversation's over. It's made an amazing recommendation. It's found the jacket at an amazing price and I cannot complete the purchase. Very cool. That's a huge barrier right now. Yeah. Uh, I know you're busy. Um, last, last kind of thought. Uh, I assume you didn't come to this last year. No, I heard there was like 300. It was small. It was small. It was like an intimate boutique kind of setting. This is my first time here. Four times bigger. Um, what do you think? I heard you were going to be here. So that's why I got, people heard you were going to be here. So that's why I got so much bigger. Oh, so that's the 10 X coming. Boom. Yeah. Here we go. You go to a lot of trade shows. How do you feel about this one? Oh, I love this. Like, so I just came from like Dreamforce last week and like to your point, like a lot of trade shows and there's a special like look and feel to this one. Like being outdoors, just being able to, to walk around. It seems to be like very high quality as far as like the meetings I've had. Yep. Um, you know, when you guys get into these scenarios where you'll have a hundred meetings in a day and it's just a blur, but I've got like four or five meetings per day, but they're all like very high, high quality. Yeah. Like, you know, yeah. The chief digital officers are here. Yeah. C-level engagement. People with agended commerce and their title are all here. So, so it's our people. Yeah. Yeah. But I've really enjoyed like meeting you and your team. Like this is, it's been a really, really good week. Thanks. We've always had a great relationship with Stripe. So appreciate you coming on the pod. Awesome. Yep. Um, Jason, want to roll us out of here? Yeah. Uh, thanks again very much for taking some time out and spending time with us. And until next time, happy commercing. Happy agendic commercing. Follow rate and share to stay up to date with retail genic. Your guide to the future of AI shopping agents.