How AI Agents Could Change Shopping Forever, w/ Chi Zhang

What happens when your next customer is not a person, but an AI agent shopping on their behalf? The way we buy things online may be about to change a lot faster than most people realize.

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Chi Zhang, cofounder and CEO of Kite, about agentic commerce and the infrastructure that could make AI agents true economic actors instead of just helpful assistants. We explore what it means to let an agent not only research flights, groceries, APIs, or consumer goods, but actually complete the transaction safely.

Along the way, we unpack why Chi describes Kite as the “Stripe for agents,” and why this shift could force businesses to rethink who they are really selling to.

We also dig into the hard part: trust. If an agent is going to spend money on your behalf, how does a merchant know that your agent is legitimate, authorized, and not a scam wearing your face?

We get into the identity, verification, authorization, privacy, and infrastructure layers that make agentic payments possible, and why those pieces matter just as much as the agents themselves.

This conversation also looks at why stablecoins and programmable money may be especially well suited to this future, particularly for micropayments, API access, and machine-to-machine commerce where traditional card rails are too expensive or clunky.

More broadly, we talk about what happens when AI agents start doing more of the comparison shopping, checkout, and transaction work that humans used to do themselves.