Purchases made from start to finish by artificial intelligence assistants are on track to outnumber those made by people clicking through websites, according to the president of one of the world’s largest payments companies.

John Collison, the billionaire Irish entrepreneur who co-founded Stripe with his brother Patrick in 2010, was on Wednesday asked whether agent-initiated transactions would overtake human ones. “I think so,” he told this masthead in an exclusive interview.

Stripe handled about $US1.9 trillion ($2.9 trillion) in payments in 2025, a figure the company says represents close to 2 per cent of the global economic output. About 37,000 new Australian businesses joined the platform each month over the past year.

If the forecast holds, it would unwind the way online retail has worked since the 1990s, when the shopfront was a website and the customer was a person with a mouse.

Collison likened the browser and the shopping app to the fax machine, and to the executives selling them in the 1970s who doubted the internet would amount to much. “All these technologies, using a web browser or using an iPhone app, those are all a moment in time,” he said. “Brands are durable, and people still want to buy bicycles and t-shirts. But the actual technological underpinnings come and go pretty quickly.”

He said purchases completed entirely inside an AI app, without the shopper ever reaching a retailer’s website, were uncommon at least for now. “That’s very small today, but we are building all the plumbing.”

The shift threatens the established economics of online retail, where visibility has been dominated by search advertising and search engine optimisation for two decades. Collison said the products surfacing in his own AI research were often smaller labels rather than global giants, pointing to Melbourne accessory maker Bellroy, a client of Stripe.

Asked who bears legal responsibility if an AI assistant orders the wrong item or is manipulated by scammers, Collison argued the technology industry oversells full autonomy. A useful assistant, he said, would still require a person to confirm the purchase before money moves.

Nobody wants to hand a holiday itinerary to software, he added, because choosing where to go is the enjoyable part. A shopper might instead tell an assistant what recipe they are cooking, and the agent can reasonably assume there is salt and onion in the cupboard while ordering the missing mince.

“The picking is the high-value work,” he said. “The low-value work is all the trudging through the forms.” He did not say where legal responsibility would ultimately sit, and said new forms of fraud were inevitable but that defences would adapt.

“It’s a cops and robbers game. Bank robbers start using cars to rob banks and then the police get cars and you know, the equilibrium evolves. And I think the equilibrium will evolve once again in the fraud area.”

Australia’s payment rules change on October 1 when the Reserve Bank will ban card surcharges and cut interchange fee caps. Collison said the reforms mattered less online, where cards were already the default. “We go along with the rules whatever they are,” he said. “If the pub closes at 11 you go home at 11.”

Stripe launched “Stripe Treasury” in Australia on Wednesday, moving it into more direct competition with Australian banks. The company is separately reported to be in talks with private equity firm Advent International over a bid for PayPal worth more than $US53 billion ($81 billion), which Collison declined to confirm or deny.

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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.