London Fintech Podcast
00:05:57 · Rohit Mishra
[00:05:57] S0: Yeah. So my role at Shopify is I lead product teams at Shopify that focus on payments that focus on the things around payments, fraud and risk, money movement, and agentic payments now, obviously. My my teams also work on Shop Pay, which is our consumer wallet checkout product, which hopefully you have used, Tony, in in the past. Mostly, I introduced myself as a person who works on the purple Shop Pay button because more consumers are familiar with that. And I also work here on how we can help our merchants manage their sales tax compliance. And and my... One of my long term focuses at Shopify has been enabling entrepreneurs to build global businesses. So anything that you need to sell internationally, some of that work at Shopify is is within my teams. I spent about ten years here, so I've done a few different things in my in my time here. Top of mind for us, obviously, agent... We spend a bunch of time thinking about agents. Agents are the new users. And so just as in the old world, would have thought a lot about what users need. We think a lot about what agents need, what their... What would make our experiences better and more optimized for agents. So that's that's that's a big part of our focus now, but we continue to work on all the other ways. You know, how do we maximize each basis point of of payment success rate for our merchants, give them more payment methods, better resiliency, less fraud. Those are some evergreen topics that that continue to occupy our mind. We're obviously investing a lot in Shop Pay, which is our consumer wallet and checkout product, and we can talk more about Shop Pay and the role that plays in in binding together all of these multichannel experiences that Shopify provides.
00:07:49 · Tony Clark
[00:07:49] S1: Yeah. And you said the agents are the new customers, so... And I think that's really gonna be the theme for this conversation. So we'll dig into that in a moment. Perhaps to start, I am curious. My own research has highlighted that you're working on the industry efforts for agentic commerce. So this is the protocols that will enable agents to go shopping on our on our behalf. Can you say a bit about that? I mean, how standardized is is agentic shopping out there at the moment, and and what are you doing to to help bring some standards into into this space?
00:08:22 · Rohit Mishra
[00:08:22] S0: Yeah. At Shopify, we are big believers in protocols. We have been over the last... I would say, like, when we've been working with w three c, which is the web consortium on on payment standards on the web. So we have brought some similar thinking to agent recovers. Late last year, we collaborated deeply with our friends at Google and many other companies in building together Universal Commerce Protocol. This UCP is is a standard protocol that defines completely embedded agent ecommerce. How does... How can an agent and a merchant reason about what does the merchant offer, the products they offer, but also all the other specific nature of of that business, the payment methods, delivery methods, fulfillment steps that they offer, and agent and and and the merchant systems can can can negotiate that completely completely in a programmatic fashion. And so UCP has been a big part of our focus in bringing together... Bringing that protocols together. UCP... Think of UCP as the overall checkout negotiation between the agent trying to buy a thing and the merchant platform trying to sell a thing. And then if you go in in a more micro nature, then we are working with the FIDO Alliance. We are working on things like the AP two payments framework, which which has mandates and consent. We're working with just very recently Poppy, which is... Which came from Sierra, which is how do you identify the agents or protocol for that. And so there's there's a there's a bunch of different initiatives that we have. We're also increasingly partner... Partnering with the major card networks on how agentic tokens work and what's needed from merchant and a wallet perspective to make agentic tokens really great. We really we really believe that in a positive sum thinking at Shopify, and the more these protocols get get standardized and and and and power a rich experience, I think it will be great for great for our merchants, but just great for the industry overall in driving agent e commerce forward. So we spend... We are spending a a bunch of our energy in both creating and sharpening these protocols on on... That that will constitute it into commerce.
00:10:40 · Tony Clark, Rohit Mishra
[00:10:40] S1: It's such a fast moving space, clearly. And those of us who are in the AI solutioning space at some level or another are just sort of getting used to MCP, which is model context protocol, which is the handshake between different models and and other systems. UCP, that was a new one on me for this conversation. That's live, right, isn't that? That was a January thing, if I'm [00:11:03] S0: right. That was a January thing that was announced at NRF, which is a major retail event by... In January this year. And... But since then, UCP completely public protocol with... That Shopify, Google, and many other many other partners together work on. And we've been working fast on evolving UCP and how UCP can can provide a very rich agentic experience. And and and there's there's great work now happening in in expanding UCP beyond beyond just, you know, physical good commerce that Shopify focuses on. So work work on travel, work on services. There are many other sectors where UCP is expanding too, so we're very excited about the potential there.
00:11:03 · Rohit Mishra, Tony Clark
[00:11:03] S0: right. That was a January thing that was announced at NRF, which is a major retail event by... In January this year. And... But since then, UCP completely public protocol with... That Shopify, Google, and many other many other partners together work on. And we've been working fast on evolving UCP and how UCP can can provide a very rich agentic experience. And and and there's there's great work now happening in in expanding UCP beyond beyond just, you know, physical good commerce that Shopify focuses on. So work work on travel, work on services. There are many other sectors where UCP is expanding too, so we're very excited about the potential there. [00:11:47] S1: Brilliant. Well, so we sort of started with a a broad brush on what you're doing in the payment space, and I thought it was important to touch on the protocols because it's sort of such a sort of wild wild west of the of the new AI landscape that these initiatives on standards are really important for AI safety and for effective use of the technology. But I guess the headline really, you know, is agentic commerce. Well, I was gonna say it's coming, but I think it's here. So maybe you can guide us a bit on some of the numbers. AI and shopping. There are lots of surveys out there about how much people... I think everyone's pretty much trusting their agents if they have an agent to go and find things for them, not everyone's trusting them to actually make the transaction yet. But what what are you seeing in the data?
00:12:38 · Rohit Mishra
[00:12:38] S0: Customers are increasingly trusting agents for coming up with what products that they should be buying. Agents are really, really great at helping you consume a lot of different information from different sources to reason about the kind of products that you are buying. We are also seeing now a lot of consumers, a smaller number, but a lot of consumers now letting people... Letting agents constitute their cards. And then a smaller fraction of of of users are letting agents completely convert... Do transactions end to end. If you if you... Just orders from searches that are originating from AI agents, we saw them three x in in the second quarter of this year, which is, like, we we are not seeing any... The thing with AI right now and agent ecommerce is everything's exponential. Nothing's nothing's x percent. Everything is three x. So that... That's what we saw. We also saw that when sessions are originating from AI agents, the conversion is 80% better than than organic search, which is which is incredible. And that the reason why that's happening is because consumers are finding a lot more trust, a lot more information upfront with agents. And so when they actually show up to buy, the the the the the intent to buy is is significantly higher. Like, one specific example I would bring up is if you think of watches and and and the category where people love to do more research, The conversion from any AI originated session is 2.4 x higher than if it was coming from a traditional search. So that's that's where we are seeing incredible results both in overall volume, but also very strong trends on conversion that bode very well for the future of agent technology.