When OpenAI and Google brought checkout directly into ChatGPT and Gemini through integrations with Stripe, PayPal, and Shopify, the story seemed obvious: collapse the funnel where discovery, recommendation, and payment all happen in one place and render search, SEM, and DTC Shopify stores secondary.

But the more I’ve dug into tokenization, agent protocols, and merchant infrastructure, the more I believe the real outcome is the inverse: Hosted checkout doesn’t disintermediate the stack - it solidifies it. Google, Amazon, Shopify, Visa, and PayPal end up stronger, not weaker. What matters is not who controls the rails but how the edges of the system expand to enable new coordination between agents, merchants, and consumers.

There will be a large number of companies in the agentic payments and commerce graveyard because the value is not in reinventing checkout or wallets. It will accrue to incumbents that already control tokens, vaults, and merchant infrastructure. The real openings for startups are narrow but meaningful, focused on building the protocols, ledgers, post purchase systems, and agent to agent payment rails that this new world will ultimately require.

This dynamic will play out because trust remains the fundamental currency of payments. Agents may abstract away user interfaces, but they will not replace the institutions that already safeguard credentials, enforce chargebacks, and manage fraud at global scale. In effect, agents will function as “smart tokens” that route intent through the same trusted vaults and rails that power commerce today, further entrenching the incumbents that control them.

The Power of Customer Files, Tokenization & Vault Forwarding

Commerce in an agentic world is only as viable as your ability to authenticate and fund intent. That is why companies with millions of customers and stored tokens have a clear structural advantage. Case in point: Perplexity teaming with PayPal or Claude integrating with Stripe, both activating millions of credentialed relationships at once.