Stripe's Five Levels of Agentic Commerce: What the Framework Means for Brands
Stripe's 2025 annual letter lays out five levels of agentic commerce. The industry is still at levels 1–2. Here's the framework and what it means for your product data and brand.
The Clearest Framework for Where AI Commerce Is Heading
Stripe just published the clearest framework for where AI commerce is actually heading. In their 2025 annual letter, the Collisons lay out five levels of agentic commerce. The honest admission that the industry is still hovering between levels 1 and 2 may be the most important part.
The Five Levels
Level 1
AI fills out forms for you. You still decide what to buy.
Level 2
You describe a situation and AI finds options. For example: "Back-to-school supplies for a third grader in Chicago who likes KPop and tennis."
Level 3
AI remembers you. No more re-explaining preferences.
Level 4
You delegate entirely. For example: "Handle back-to-school shopping. Keep it under $400."
Level 5
No prompt at all. Things show up before you ask.
What This Means for Brands
At levels 1 and 2, your website still matters
A human is still browsing, still influenced by brand, design, and storytelling.
By level 3, the game changes
An AI agent with memory does not care about your homepage hero image. It cares about structured product data: materials, sizing, use cases, reviews, return policies. The brands that invested in beautiful storefronts but neglected their product data layer will become invisible to the systems that are increasingly doing the shopping.
By levels 4 and 5, the relationship shifts
The brand's relationship is not with the consumer anymore. It is with the agent. And agents do not have brand loyalty. They have data quality preferences.
Agents and the Next Decade of E-Commerce
Stripe also shared a stat that is easy to miss: they believe agents will soon be responsible for most internet transactions. Not some. Most. That is why they built Tempo (their payments blockchain) to handle over 1 billion transactions per second and launched Shared Payment Tokens so agents can pay without exposing credentials.
The comparison to the mid-90s internet is apt. We are in the protocol wars of commerce right now: Stripe's Agent Commerce Protocol with OpenAI, Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, machine-to-machine stablecoin micropayments. The standards being set today will determine who gets to participate in the next decade of e-commerce.
The Question Worth Answering Now
The brands preparing for this are not just optimizing their online stores. They are treating product data as a first-class strategic asset and asking themselves: when an AI agent is the one shopping, what does my brand look like to a machine?
That is the question worth answering now, while we are still at level 2.