Agents could unlock purchases people currently avoid

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 19:29

   If I could ask you to put on like a pair of like future goggles and imagine this sort of future agentic economy where everyone has a ton of agents. We just ran into people on our way in here and everyone is talking about instinct and how now people can, they have their agents that can really make purchases and operate in the world. Plus like the payments infrastructure that Stripe offers. What do you think is this future?

2. 20:00

   of economy that you or, you know, Patrick and John kind of imagine when you're piecing all these sort of amazing companies to work alongside each other, like even the acquisition of bridge that they made, there's sort of this very clear, like interesting set of things. Yeah, I mean, I sometimes I talk to people about agent payments, and I'm and, and people are like, this is like, this is never gonna work.

3. 20:30

   like I enjoy shopping. Like I want to go to Amazon. I want to like see the things that I'm buying before I buy them. Um, I would never use this. And, you know, I personally am not like that. Like I know I would buy a lot of stuff if agent payments worked really well. Um, I, I know I would finally get my toothpaste delivered on a schedule instead of like walking across the street to the pharmacy to buy it like every two months. Um, if I could do it like with an agent and like cancel the schedule or modify the schedule with just text um and i know i would even do that for like shirts and we were just all kinds of things we're the same shirt that you were six years ago on our podcast you could get a few more shirts i don't have like that many clothes i would definitely get more clothes if my agent like knew my size like you

4. 21:20

   know because i ordered something within the past and like it knew some things about me and knew some things about brands that like matter around the world. And there are studies that prove that people enjoy the process of planning a trip more than the actual trip. Like some people find a lot of gratitude in those experiences. I am not one of those people. I, there's still some experiences where I might want to like do it manually, but with a lot of things in AI, you know, there, there's the span of tasks that you know you do and love and then there's the span of tasks that you don't love and you don't even know how wide that span is because you don't do those tasks like you don't understand the magnitude of how big that section is because you avoid it naturally So if an agent is going to take over that whole set of tasks for you, it, I think, is going to be way larger than everybody thinks because everybody's underestimating it.

5. 22:31

   You don't know the magnitude of purchases you're going to make for things you don't like to purchase because you don't do it. So you can't know how big it is. Do you think people will buy more? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think people will buy a lot more and people will buy things they don't normally buy and people will programmatically buy things that they don't normally buy or create, you know, like group buying entities that like buy everything for a whole group.

6. 22:59

   group, people will give more gifts, people will use more of their disposable income, people will donate more, people will possibly return more goods if it gets easier. And so there's all kinds of magnitude of the 1% issues, where once you build a really good product that targets the 1% of use cases that people aren't doing, that 1% blows up into a much bigger percent. This is constantly happening with AI, where the top 1% of intelligence tasks that people aren't able to do themselves suddenly blows up to become like most of their spend because it's now just so much more efficient to like do R&D and discover.

7. 24:00

   and spend there.