How do you effectively monetize artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can do anything?
With a payments foundation that can support everything they do, Emily Glassberg Sands, Stripe’s head of information and data science, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.
The context was news reported by PYMNTS March 15 that ChatGPT creator OpenAI will use Stripe’s financial infrastructure platform to monetize its ChatGPT and DALL-E AI products, while Stripe will incorporate OpenAI’s own generative AI technology into its products and services.
“There’s two sides to this partnership, and we’re really excited about both of them,” Sands told Webster.
“We’re powering [OpenAI’s] monetization strategy, and [OpenAI is helping] Stripe evolve from our first act as a pure-payments focus to becoming a financial one-stop-shop [for the digital economy],” Sands said.
Stripe has partnered with OpenAI since the early days of ChatGPT, leveraging the GPT-3 large language model (LLM) to help its support team better serve users through tasks like routing issue tickets and summarizing users’ questions.
The payment platform also served as an enterprise beta tester for the just-released GPT-4 LLM interface, trialing the efficacy of its next generation capabilities across operational areas that included streamlining user experience as well as combating fraud.
Using Stripe’s suite of products, OpenAI was able to launch a global payments system for multiple product lines, Sands said, in record time.
The payment solutions support monetization of OpenAI’s viral image generator DALL-E and the headline-grabbing ChatGPT bot, and include billing and checkout features for customers signing up for monthly ChatGPT subscriptions or buying DALL-E credits, as well as internal automation and tax compliance technology for OpenAI more broadly, leaving businesses to focus on building their own proprietary AI technology, not creating an internal payments infrastructure.
“Our thesis is, we want to make it really easy for companies to spin up new monetization strategies in a way that is simple for them and their developers,” Sands said.
Sands said that 75% of the 500 leading generative AI companies have signed up for Stripe as they build solutions that no one thought “AI could do five, 10 years ago.”
Generative AI is bringing with it a true paradigm shift. Originally a nonprofit, OpenAI shifted to create a for-profit entity when Microsoft invested $1 billion in 2019. And the rapid influx of innovators with AI-inspired businesses is a familiar dynamic for Stripe.
Launched in 2010 as the mobile economy was taking off, Stripe’s mobile payments platform helped onboard and launch the mobile app economy with just a few lines of code. Fast forward 13 years, the opportunity to power the AI economy is in very much the same space.
“When businesses in the AI economy can go to market quickly, this means in turn their customers can leverage AI tools to build entirely new businesses, or become more efficient by evolving their business model and better meeting the needs of their customers, Sands said, adding that Stripe is trying to create as many useful [solutions] as possible to enable them to go to market quickly.”
Read more: How Truly Responsive and Intelligent AI Will Change Business
Sands emphasized that AI isn’t new for Stripe. They’ve been using the technology for their own internal processes and products for “many years.”
At Stripe alone, there are currently 14 GPT-4 prototypes in the works, Sands added.
Among those emergent solutions are a way for Stripe’s software developers to type out a question and receive summarized answers, as well as a customer-facing solution that allows Stripe customers to make queries and receive answers about their own business analytics.
“There is a lot of opportunity to build new user-facing products, or those that better delight users in an existing experience, using AI,” Sands said.
As competition heats up, the next question will be whether those AI companies presently proliferating are able to do the same for themselves and successfully commercialize and scale.
When they do, payments will be at the heart of it all.
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
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