Nicholas Stevens

Agentic Commerce at @Stripe. Previously Zillow AI, Prismatic, and Twitter(?!). Swept the 'Best Attitude' award in sports

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

Congratulations to ChaNJestimate! They won our Zestimate ML competition and the $1M prize money.

Huge credit to Andy Martin for leading the way, and to @StanHumphries for making our "we should surprise them with a giant check" idea a reality

https://t.co/7ybNh0fNu3

[Matt Huang @matthuang]

What’s cool about this launch from Instinct is that stablecoins (on Tempo via Stripe Link) power it seamlessly underneath.

Programmable money for AI agents.

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

You can buy stuff across the internet with Claude Duet & @link. So you can focus on running your business, not researching & paying for the basics.

Lots more to come in this space 🚀

[Stripe @stripe]

We’re working with Anthropic to help you run your businesses inside Claude Duet.

• Make purchases with @link
• Issue refunds and understand business trends with the Stripe MCP

[Jen @BackseatVC]

Muse, Instinct, and Grokbot really changed agentic commerce

From what we can see on @link, total transactions increased by 38x, volume by 20x in September

What are people having their agents buy? Retail was the most popular, then travel, and then music and entertainment

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:

• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.

• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.

• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!

• It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)

• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to).

• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.

• Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.

Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

[Steve Kaliski @stevekaliski]

With @LangChain and @link you can easily build agents with buying power (and use @mpp for programmatic payments).

[Jen @BackseatVC]

You can now give your agent a @tryramp card and let it buy from businesses on @stripe via @mpp!

In this demo, I show how a business owner could use Codex to buy wine for a few top customers:

- My agent helps me find my most engaged customers using the Stripe MCP and our CRM notes.
- It finds @MartinEstate in the Stripe Directory and recommends wine within my budget.
- I approve the purchase, and it pays with a Ramp card via MPP!

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

After a decade at @zillow, I've joined @stripe / Agentic Commerce!

Excited to build with @jeff_weinstein & co 🚀

[Jeff Weinstein @jeff_weinstein]

a big WebMCP news morning!

- @meta wearables: https://t.co/PDZBAuvIvX
- @usekernel browsers: https://t.co/UkZ3wwSt5C
- @cloudflare workers: https://t.co/SesabgMVFs
- @shopify checkouts: https://t.co/eVRfOFdW5y

@stripe is already seeing traction in agents using WebMCP checkout

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

@OfficialLoganK @OpenAI Has been fun to work with you on Zillow's plugin!

https://t.co/tAb2benGpS

[Zillow @zillow]

Find your next home with a simple conversation.

Check out how the new Zillow plugin for #ChatGPT can help you on your homebuying journey. 💬

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

The Zestimate now includes real-time updates & neural networks!

We're pretty proud of the accuracy results for our users, all the cross-company collaboration it took to get here, and, frankly, our donut selection for this release. 😄🍩📈🏠👩‍🔬💻 https://t.co/eV6qznyf2B

[Krishna Rao @_krishnarao]

Love this @Rich_Barton quote: The opportunity is “scary, unknown, dangerous, huge, and awesome,”

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

@hawkblogger Also interesting that the variance is wider in the early years.

Thanks for plotting instead of just reporting the average! 📈

[vicki @vboykis]

It's only called a Neural Network if it comes from the Neuralè region of France. Otherwise you have to call it a logistic regression.

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

@TMobile Love free food! #ThankYouMeal #contest

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

@rebekah_bastian @ZillowGroup @JMaseIII .@JMaseIII was the best!

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

@hawkblogger I'd look into https://t.co/rRsZeYLELg. Free, easy to set up, and will cache your site so (a) all the traffic doesn't hit your server and (b) it will stay up when the server is down! 📈

[Stan Humphries @StanHumphries]

Nick Stevens talking AI at @ZillowGroup Broker Forum in Chicago @njs @jasjeetthind

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

Prof Derek Hoiem talking about his collaboration with Alex Coulburn & @Zillow AI on 3D indoor reconstruction from a single image.

LayoutNet paper: https://t.co/pG146gC0Y8 #ZGAIForum

[Nicholas Stevens @njs]

Go Shruti! She's explaining how the @Zillow AI team and titles have evolved in our growth from 20 to 100+ people.

Check out the latest iteration here: https://t.co/pptyign2tf 😁👩‍🔬📊

[Spencer Rascoff @spencerrascoff]

This was one of my favorite quotes from @VanJones68 on the Office Hours podcast. We all lose – our employees, customers and communities – if we don’t tap into genius everywhere. My latest @inc piece on the topic: https://t.co/BFaB8Vt9Va