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

AI-Curious with Jeff Wilser

Every week, Jeff Wilser sits down with the people building, breaking, and reckoning with AI — from the CEO of Upwork to the pioneer who coined "AGI" to an AI social network where bots wrote manifestos and had existential crises. Wilser is the author of eight books, AI keynote speaker, and the kind of interviewer who'd rather find the story no one's telling than rehash the headline everyone's read. Named by Inc. Magazine as one of the best ways to get AI-savvy. Included in UC Berkeley's data science curriculum.

All Episodes

AI-Curious with Jeff Wilser

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

June 04, 2026 • Jeff Wilser

0:00 | 57:26

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.

Guest
Chi Zhang — Cofounder and CEO, Kite

Check out Kite AI

Follow AI-Curious on your favorite podcast platform:

Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
All Other Platforms

For anyone interested in Jeff’s AI Workshops for their company:

Reach out directly at jeff@jeffwilser.com

— Chi’s background, from speed skating to building Kite

— The shift from ZetaBlock to Kite and why agent payments became the focus

— Why AI agents need infrastructure to actually transact, not just advise

— What Kite means by “agency for everyone”

— Why today’s power-user agent workflows are still too complex for most people

— Why agentic commerce has moved from whiteboard theory toward something real

— Why Chi thinks agent payments are coming sooner than many expect

— Emerging use cases, including token reselling and API-based business models

— The infrastructure breakthroughs that made this moment possible

— The trust, verification, and privacy problems behind agent payments

— Why stablecoins looked like a better fit than cards for agent-native payments

— Why micropayments may finally make sense when agents, not humans, are deciding

— The layers of infrastructure behind agentic payments and commerce

— Why businesses may need to become searchable by agents or risk becoming invisible

— How identity, session control, and authorization work in agent transactions

— A practical example of using Kite Agent Passport to buy something through Claude

— How flexible human-in-the-loop shopping could evolve over time

— Chi’s vision for how agentic commerce could reshape work, shopping, and the economy