Agents and machines want what you’re selling. This is how you make them pay.

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Hi everybody and welcome back to Stripe Sessions 2026. We're back in the developer hub and I'm being joined by Courtney and James from Monetization OS. We've got a really interesting topic here. So, James, you have a fundamentally different view of how purchases are going to happen very, very soon. What is it? Well, we know that their typical customer journeys for human is designed around navigation, right? You go and do certain things designed around the human. Transactions are changing and it isn't just a bot.

[00:00:30]We've got this new type of traffic called agents and we know that the agent type of traffic wants to transact in a different way and we also understand that their job is a different job to be done. They're executing a task and that requires a fundamentally different transaction method. So, Courtney, what does that really mean? You know, the idea that bots buy things, I mean, it seems very alien to a lot of the audience. How what does that look like?

[00:00:50]Well, what it really means is that your total addressable market is exploding, right? But at the moment, a lot of businesses are only prepared to serve humans. So, the serviceable addressable market is much much smaller than the actual total market that they have available to them. What you can now do is take a product that maybe once upon a time was very black and white, was all or nothing and you can divide that up into these monetizable components and really remix them in any way you like to sell lots of different things to all of those different types of users.

[00:01:17]So, so what sort of products do you have in mind that can be treated this way?

[00:01:21]Well, I think that you're going to be having typical types of human the human user needs to be served. A bot type of traffic is looking to extract information, is looking for information and order that information. I think what we're talking about here is a potential hybrid between a an agent which has been asked by human to go and execute a task.

[00:01:39]It's doing it asynchronously, but the transaction itself has to be happening in real time. And as Courtney said, this is very, very important concept around being able to explode your product, being able to unbundle that product and re-compose that product dynamically and for the type of use case and the intent that you're serving. Yeah, yeah. I think it'd be great to actually have a look at this because really it's an extraordinary idea, but it makes a lot of sense when you see the demo. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh this is Basecase.

[00:02:06]This is a financial intelligence uh tool that is serving uh customers with data streams for US listed companies, right? Um and at the moment, I am logged in, but I don't have a subscription. So, I really can't see any of the value that I'm going to get from that product. So, if I decide that I want to make a purchase, I have to make a pretty like hefty purchasing decision to determine if I'm going to buy it or not.

[00:02:30]But actually, what we're saying is that these companies that have large volumes of content, things like calculated metrics, financial statements, maybe it's different types of video, maybe it's different types of data, different types of article content, they can really divvy those up into all of these monetizable components.

[00:02:47]And so, you can do that in Monetization OS using our entitlements layer, using our offers and experiences and our access rules. So, all of the uh features that we saw on that page, we can set those up as features. And within that, we can also have these properties. And properties are really the things that create that entitlement model, those dials and levers. So, they could be meters, they could be booleans, it could be the volume of downloads you can have.

[00:03:13]And then what we allow you to do is come together and build and bundle those into plans. So, for example, I have a plan here for my authenticated user and I can come through and actually change the configuration based on all of those features and feature properties that I have available to me.

[00:03:31]I can also choose how I assign those plans. So, in this instance, this is auto assigned so that every authenticated user is going to get that level of access we just saw. But I can also auto assign to anonymous users, to bots and crawlers and obviously for subscribers through Stripe products. So, we can link directly with a Stripe product, give that plan and and grant that level of access that's available to us.

[00:03:54]So, if we jump back into Basecase now and I refresh my page, now I'm going to see access to the to those graphs. So, I added that entitlement to the authenticated entitlement plan and now I can get a little bit of access. I can kind of start to see what this product has to offer me.

[00:04:12]So, maybe that means that I now want to look at pricing and on this pricing page, I'm going to see these offers and these experiences.

[00:04:21]Monetization OS also handles all of this. So, we can determine what is the best offer for the right user at the right time. So, what's the price, what's the discount, what are the feature sets that we're going to offer.

[00:04:33]So, if we jump into our experiences over here, we can see this experience that's been set up for humans.

[00:04:39]I can jump into my offers and I can see which offers I have available, but I can also stack multiple offers within that.

[00:04:47]So, if you were to look at this page, you could see a completely different offer set to what I see, to what James sees based on what we think you are most likely to convert on.

[00:04:56]On top of that, you can also edit these.

[00:04:58]So, you can jump in, you can change the code yourself or you can use our assistant to really change the look and feel of these experiences. That might be a product selection page like this is, but it could also be things like a footer, a modal, any customer user experience that you would like to serve with us.

[00:05:16]Wow.

[00:05:17]So, if I was a Stripe user currently, how would I go about using this with my products? Can I easily integrate with my existing Stripe integration? Absolutely.

[00:05:27]We we link natively completely. So, these offers are linked to products within Stripe, we generate that checkout experience and what's really exciting is that we can also generate that checkout experience for machine traffic as well.

[00:05:39]So, this is a very human example, but actually if we scroll down, there is also this offer for agents as well.

[00:05:46]So, maybe I'm still this authenticated user, I've come through, I've seen the graphs, but I'm still not quite sure if I want to hand over that $19 per month.

[00:05:55]But maybe if I see a few sort of full profiles from the state of company, maybe that would be enough to actually encourage me to subscribe.

[00:06:05]So, what I can do is use an agent to come through and actually purchase that.

[00:06:10]This is using the Stripe link CLI that was just released yesterday at Stripe Sessions. Well done, congratulations.

[00:06:16]We'd love to see it. And essentially, what it's doing is it is going away and making a request to us and we are returning a 402 and saying, "Actually, you can't access this at the moment.

[00:06:26]You're going to have to pay for that level of access."

[00:06:30]And what it will do is it will then generate a payment link and I will be able to go through and accept that payment. What I really like about that is that we're keeping a human in the loop. Obviously, we have some great use cases for things with stablecoin and going through crypto and all of these machine uh machine payments, um but I think for a lot of people, for a lot of human beings today, that's still not something they're quite comfortable with. And so, what we really like about the Stripe link CLI is that we can create that approval link and actually have a user come back through, click that link and then approve it.

[00:07:06]So, I have that link now. I've just clicked approve. It is going to ask me to complete that payment and verify my payment. And that's no different to me making a purchase online when I go online shopping, right?

[00:07:19]So, that's going to come through and process and as we jump back into Cloud, we'll see that that payment has been completed and in a few seconds, it's going to return that data to me. So, Mars now knows, yes, you do have access, you should have access to that content.

[00:07:33]We're going to return that and you can use that that data however you see fit.

[00:07:37]Yeah. You're right on the cutting edge here with this concept and with the whole business idea. What are the early signals in terms of the sorts of customers you see? What what sort of industry match do you have?

[00:07:48]Is it better for certain industries other than others or is it broad spectrum? Well, our perspective really is that this is going to be affecting every industry without fail. The the market is changing pretty dramatically.

[00:07:58]There are certain industries which act as like a canary in the coal mine and we're certainly seeing in the media space, not only do they want to innovate around the product composition, they want to change and explode that product and re-compose it for the user, but they also are facing existential crisis around the theft of their content. Now, what this is necessitating is a fundamental change in architecture and we have advocated for and built some pretty cutting edge technology to allow us to make super fast decisions at massive scale, really low latency at the edge and that fundamental change in architecture is going to be a necessity for this future version of the internet that we're all starting to see coming together.

[00:08:35]Yeah. And actually, the timing is incredible because a lot of the things we've seen here at Stripe this week really tie into a lot of these topics.

[00:08:41]What are the most interesting things you've seen at the conference so far?

[00:08:45]Well, we're particularly excited about Link. I mean, the the potential with Link is phenomenal. I mean, obviously we saw John Collison this morning showing a pretty interesting demonstration on screen showing about accessing information, building up a different composition of a product. This product is perfectly synchronized with that example. Now, the key thing, particularly when you move into large scale enterprises, how do you wrap these kind of things in rules, decisions and that's where this kind of product comes into play. They can manage it, you can control it, you can create the constraints and then really start to allow product functions, business functions to start to be creative. It's a very exciting moment. Agents has taken over this entire conference and and it feels like this is the right time for this kind of product. Yeah, the timing is incredible. Yeah, I think one of the things that really excites me is that for years now, you have done things like art of the possible discussions, right?

[00:09:32]You go into a business and you go, "Here's what we could do. Here's what we'd like to do." And now that is really a conversation of here's what we can do.

[00:09:40]So, one of the some of the most exciting conversations that James and I having at the moment are going into businesses and saying, "Here's how you can go from having this one or two or three products that you've had for years and years and years and really explode that to find things that work for your customers, right?" So, how can you as a business repurpose this amazing content that you have, this brilliant IP that you have, and make it really, really valuable to every user of the internet? Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:07]Well, it's absolutely fascinating to see this, and really, I mean, just looking how far we've come in 12 months in this whole thing. So, I'm sure the journey for the next couple of years is going to be absolutely incredible. For developers watching this who want to give this a try, what's the URL I should go to? You can go to monetizationos.com. We have a freemium tier, so you're welcome to sign up and start using it. Find me on LinkedIn or wherever you'd like to. I'd love to have a chat and show you more about the product. And the Stripe Link CLI is also the developer waitlist for that is also open now. So, make sure you're just checking that out, too. Will do. Well, thank you both for joining us, and thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon on another Stripe Session.

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