The basic assumptions behind online commerce are starting to fracture, says Paul Conroy, CTO at Square1, as he looks back at last week’s Stripe Sessions in San Francisco.
Stripe bills Sessions as its “internet economy conference”. Across a few days in San Francisco, thousands of people from around the world gathered last week to talk about the future of online commerce.
But for all the product launches and big-name keynotes, one fundamental shift kept surfacing – the basic assumptions behind online commerce are starting to fracture.
For more than 20 years, payment systems have been built on the assumption that bots are the problem. A good customer browses, hesitates, clicks around and eventually buys something. A suspicious customer lands directly on a payment page, provides almost zero behavioural signal and comes from a server farm rather than a smartphone.
Stripe Sessions 2026 made it very clear: that assumption is dead. In the next phase of commerce, it’s likely that the bot is actually the customer.
