August 19, 2026 — 6:00pm 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. 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.