OpenAI x Stripe Agentic Commerce Protocol Has Makings of Silicon Valley Catfight

If there is one thing you notice about the two recent announcements in the last couple of months from:

Stripe x OpenAI: Agentic Commerce Protocol

Google: Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)

... if you pull together the list of partners on both sides, you notice that Paypal is on one side (Google) and Stripe is on the other side (ChatGPT). That puts the two major payment competitors on opposite sides of the fence.

The gold standard for commerce is really the reach of the payment network and who owns the wallet. The wallet is always going to be the commerce "last mile" from a payments point of view, which is one of the two major pillars of commerce along with logistics (which is kind of out of scope for this exercise at the moment).

Previously, the largest reach for any payment provider is with scaled marketplaces (Uber, Etsy, eBay, AirBnB, Amazon, etc etc) and so these were the most valuable partners (witness Paypal was birthed on the back of eBay). With LLMs, we have a new distribution game to win, with new bets to be made.

OpenAI is the most promising and scaled challenger brand in this race, far outpacing others having essentially kickstarted the whole space. It makes sense that Stripe would partner with OpenAI since they are the challenger versus the traditional payment networks and scaled incumbent payment networks like Paypal.

Curious note: Etsy is on the list of Google AP2 and Stripe ACP. In fact, one of the only companies on both lists. I think this fact will change as we go forward because if you are a middleman (marketplace or eCommerce platform) in the long-term you don't want to be only one of these, you will want to be on both.

What about the platforms? As of today's announcement, there are a lot of people in the Stripe camp (including Shopify who was named by OpenAI right with Etsy), however you see other announcements from most of the other major players of any scale (commercetools, Big/Commerce, Woo).

Interestingly, I haven't yet seen a Stripe announcement from Salesforce or Adobe - just Google. Could be I missed it.

Long-term? I don't expect commerce platforms to be able to pick sides.

Perhaps I'll be wrong, but the logic doesn't make sense for me that even a Stripe-powered Shopify would shut out Google Gemini or the AP2 protocol long-term. Suffice to say that I think Shopify's partnership with programs like Amazon Buy With Prime shows the Shopify long-term is willing to bend its own rules even if it's called that same partner "evil empire" in the past.

Long term I do feel platforms will be pushed into both camps by their merchants. And yes, I do believe these are the only camps that matter. Payment wallets, however, may be forced to pick sides due to Google/Paypal and Stripe/OpenAI already being aligned.

But where does this leave Shop Pay? That my friends will be a question for another post.