Madrona IA40: the unresolved question of who owns customer data when AI agents buy

At Madrona's IA40 Summit in Seattle, executives from Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic and Stripe debated who keeps the customer relationship and its data once an AI agent is in the middle. Amazon has already blocked Meta's Muse assistant from shopping on its site, while Stripe reported a sharp rise in agentic commerce over the past six weeks.

• Microsoft predicts most business software will be used by AI assistants, weakening vendors' pricing power
• Stripe: agentic commerce was flat for 8-9 months, then rose sharply in six weeks
• Anthropic writes about 200x more code than 18 months ago, but customers lag behind
• McKinsey: 40% of companies report AI-driven profit gains, only 6% call them substantial