Machines of Buying and Selling Grace - Adam Behrens, New Generation
Jul 23, 2025 · 19:37
Adam Behrens, CEO of New Gen, argues that AI will transform commerce from static websites to agentic interactions where buyer and seller agents negotiate via intent infrastructure. He traces the evolution from clerk-assisted stores to e-commerce, now to AI-natives where ChatGPT and Claude act as shopping interfaces. Behrens details three challenges: payment delegation (solved via Viza's delegated authentication), product discovery (a unified API akin to Plaid for merchants), and preference representation (two-sided, dynamic, with market-design solutions). He cites Samsung's adoption of an MCP server for chat clients and notes that AI-sourced users convert at higher rates. Behrens predicts revenue sharing via affiliate models and that agents may bypass credit cards for stablecoins, while merchants retain control by embedding transportable data into model providers' surfaces.
