London Fintech Podcast
00:27:01 · Rohit Mishra
And so that and so that agents can then deal with how to collect that information or part... Or or bring the user in in in use... In Universal Commerce Protocol, we have the concept from escalation because in some in some cases, for example, age verification, you want the user to be able to consent to that. And it says it might be a compliance requirement for that the merchant carries. And so we have done a very seamless integration of the con... The transaction can happen agentically, But where needed, if needed, the agent can say, hey, user. You have to really provide me this additional information so I can complete the transaction. So that's what you... The Universal Commerce Protocol and the products that Shopify has built around that with how Checkout and Checkout Kit really come into play. And then then I would say is is the Shop Pay layer because Shop Pay, what it does is it it when you use Shop Pay, merchant... It already understands the things that merchants need. It has all the buy information, their payment methods, their shipping addresses, and it... It's a one click experience for you to complete the transaction. And so those are the three large bodies of work for us on catalog, the the protocol itself on checkout, and then... And Shop Pay and bringing that into the agent tech interface. I would say that those have been the three main massive things that we have done. And and now we have, just a couple of weeks ago, what we did is launch this new thing called shop. Dev. Shop. Dev takes all of our work and makes it available to agents in a really simple format. You talked about MCP. We are massive fans of MCP and the beauty and simplicity of MCP. And so shop. Dev is basically a a large MCP server that's helping agents discover discover products, run checkouts, use Shop Pay on anything on the Internet. And and so that's the combination that's really helping us drive more agents to adopt commerce.
00:29:02 · Tony Clark, Rohit Mishra
[00:29:02] S1: So there's there's sort of the agentic storefront. So I hadn't thought of that. So the concept of, as you put it, I think, deduplicating and presenting the data of the product catalog in a way that agents will find very easy to, consume. So if I'm a merchant, so I've got my shop and I want to Shopify it. So presumably, one of the advantages here is that I would provide my catalog information to Shopify, but Shopify would then present that in a way that is agentic friendly. [00:29:35] S0: Absolutely. So merchants already are coming to Shopify. They are giving us all their product details. What we have now done for agents is you can go and and map your... The way you think about your product. So I'll give you specific examples. Right? Like, in apparel, which is one of our, you know, large categories at Shopify, this man... That everybody has treats, for example, sizes differently. You might think this is size x, this is size y for me. And and so how does how do you... How does what... How do how does the way you reason about your business get translated into a more consistent structured format for agents? That's what Shopify enables brands on Shopify to do. But it's all about that cat that catalog mapping. We obviously are doing a lot of work behind the scenes with our machine learning and AI models to make it as easy and seamless as possible. But at the same time, you need to give merchants control so that they can best express their business. And so... And and and that has been a massive part of our efforts here.
00:29:35 · Rohit Mishra, Tony Clark
[00:29:35] S0: Absolutely. So merchants already are coming to Shopify. They are giving us all their product details. What we have now done for agents is you can go and and map your... The way you think about your product. So I'll give you specific examples. Right? Like, in apparel, which is one of our, you know, large categories at Shopify, this man... That everybody has treats, for example, sizes differently. You might think this is size x, this is size y for me. And and so how does how do you... How does what... How do how does the way you reason about your business get translated into a more consistent structured format for agents? That's what Shopify enables brands on Shopify to do. But it's all about that cat that catalog mapping. We obviously are doing a lot of work behind the scenes with our machine learning and AI models to make it as easy and seamless as possible. But at the same time, you need to give merchants control so that they can best express their business. And so... And and and that has been a massive part of our efforts here. [00:30:35] S1: Yeah. I like that example. Aperol. So shoes. Right? So I'm an I'm an eight in The UK. You guys in The States had a half a size. Don't know why. So I think I'm an eight and a half and and a forty two in Europe. So you you build that context in so the agents can understand they're buying the right product?
00:30:55 · Rohit Mishra
[00:30:55] S0: Absolutely. Right? Because you might be sitting in The US, but you want to be able to... Your agents to think about brands worldwide. Why not? Because you're you're... You don't want to you don't want to be restricted by what you want to buy. And... But how does the agent reason about Tony's size eight. Right? But actually, not size eight in The... Size seven and a half in the in The US. We go one size up. Right? Or one size lower. I I always mix it up. Is The UK... Is The UK size shoe size one size bigger or one size smaller? I should I should remember. This is how I end up with wrong shoe shoe sizes. You and I, having bought a few dozens of shoes in our lifetime, are still thinking about it. Agents are agents are just trying to model how our brains work. So like we are confused, they can be confused. And I think that's the that's the advantage of Shopify being a full end to end commerce platform and how we don't look... When we approach these problems, obviously, you know, in my world, I deeply think about payments and payments protocol and liability, etcetera. But but all of those only work in the broader context of commerce that that that we really deeply focus on. And so the... Our goal is that imagine in a in a in an old... If this thing... If agent ecommerce had shown up ten, fifteen years ago, what would have likely have happened is the largest brand... Retail... Retailers of the world, the largest marketplaces of the world, they would have been able to take advantage of it, and most small businesses would have had to sit it out because they couldn't deal with the complexity. And and we are very excited about all the work that we are doing and which makes it... This is making it that agents recommend more small businesses. The buyers, when we when we did our survey this year, what we saw in in across many regions is buyers want to reach for brands that are more differentiated. And and so there is a deep desire to to go support more small businesses, have more... Like, buy more differentiated brands. And that's what Shopify is all about. So so so we so we are... We we are working hard to make sure that our merchants fully capture this opportunity.
00:33:08 · Tony Clark, Rohit Mishra
[00:33:08] S1: Yeah. So you're democratizing access to buyers for the merchants, and you're also democratizing access to the independent brands for the purchaser. So [00:33:21] S0: Absolutely. Absolutely. We we we deeply we deeply believe that the con... That most consumers want access to a wide variety of brands. They obviously want the... A great experience. They want trust. And similarly, the most important thing for... From the... On... From a brand and small business perspective is discovery, being able to find and serve more buyers. And our job with our... Is to is to make both... Connect both sides as well as we can do. We have done that in many different ways, and now agents seem like a great way to to make more of that happen. [00:33:58] S1: And as we've just been talking, you know, the agentic commerce revolution, if I can call it that, is is is happening now, and the numbers support the ever faster adoption. What do you see happening over the next twelve months? What's ahead?
00:34:15 · Rohit Mishra
[00:34:15] S0: Yeah. So I I would say, like, I I will talk about what's coming next on agent tech, and I'll also throw in a couple of things beyond agent tech that are related. Agent tech, I think one of the big things, Tony, that we are doing is with Shop Pay, which is our consumer wallet product. How do we make sure the best of Shop Pay is available to the buyer no matter which agent that they are that they are working with? So we've been doing a lot of work in making sure it's really easy. It's a matter of days now that you can you can go and you go... Can go to our developer dashboard, point your agent to our developer dashboard and say, hey. I would like like to add Shop Pay to my agent. And it's it's really simple. In a matter of days, you can go live. And then... And now you... As a consumer, I can use Shop Pay to buy my favorite shoes, but I also can... You... Again, I can use it to buy tickets. Anything that I'm using my agent for, I can use Shop Pay for that. And and behind the scenes for this, we're working very closely with the... With with our friends at Visa and Mastercard and Amex, etcetera, on on the agentic token frameworks that they have been working on and to make sure that that carries the right level of security and protection for all interested parties in the ecosystem, the consumer, the merchant, networks, banks, and that has been a big part of our focus. So what we are going to announce later today, or I guess in a week... It would be a week ago when when when viewers see this, is the is the deepening of our of our work with networks and agentic tokens. So that when you tell Instinct, hey. Please help me buy tickets at a museum, how is that... How is the Instinct taking your card information? And and without the agent seeing your card, without the end merchant seeing your card, using all of the tokenization technologies, making sure that the transactions are still happening on your card, The merchant remains the merchant of record. You get all the protection. You get all the rewards that you expect, but your information remains fully secure. And so that's that's the work that we are really pushing forward on this week with agentic tokens. We are also doing other things here, Tony. We... One of the big thing... Areas of focus for us is how do buyers deal with more fraud and risk?