The way customers find and choose what to buy is being rebuilt around AI. Here is what stood out from two days at Stripe’s annual conference in San Francisco, and what it means for businesses outside Silicon Valley.
I spent the last two days of April at Stripe Sessions 2026 at Moscone West, alongside roughly 9,000 other business leaders, founders, and developers. Stripe announced 288 new products and features. The list was long, but the underlying theme was simple: the path a customer takes from “I need something” to “I bought it” is being rewritten, and AI sits in the middle of it.
The shift
Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison opened the conference with a striking framing: AI is the biggest platform shift for the economy since the internet itself, and in the not-too-distant future, agents will account for most transactions online.
The supporting trend is already visible. A majority of searches on ChatGPT today are discovery-based, where someone is looking for a product, service, or recommendation rather than a quick factual answer. Google’s AI Mode and Gemini app do similar work for Google users. Customers are increasingly choosing what to buy before they ever land on a company website.
What it means for everyday businesses
The website is no longer the only front door. A growing share of customer decisions are being made inside AI assistants, based on whatever those assistants can find about you. That includes your website content, your product and service descriptions, your reviews, and your information across the broader web.
Structured information beats clever copy. AI assistants pull from clear, well-organized data more readily than from marketing prose. Plain language, accurate details, and current pricing are now part of marketing, not just a developer concern.
And the gap between leaders and laggards will widen quickly. Forrester projects that ninety percent of B2B buying activity will involve AI agents by 2028.
Why we went
At Emerge, we build websites, web applications, and software for local governments, park districts, nonprofits, and small businesses across Ohio. The organizations we work with want to know how to make their information findable and their services easier to access as AI changes what customers and constituents expect. Stripe Sessions was part of how we stay in front of those questions.
If your organization is starting to think through what AI-driven discovery means for your website or operations, we are happy to talk it through.
