Notion and Stripe see agents as primary product users
Product leaders are starting to design onboarding, APIs and CLIs for agent customers rather than human ones, a shift that affects authentication, pricing and interface design across SaaS. Teams building MCP servers or agent-facing tooling can use this as a signal for where platform surfaces are heading. The comparison between Stripe and Notion shows the same thesis crossing both payments and knowledge work.
Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari shared a clip of Stripe's Patrick Collison describing how agents and Claude Code instances would use Stripe directly.
Kothari said the same view applies inside Notion, with transactions reframed as knowledge and transacting as collaboration.
Both companies are weighing questions such as how an agent signs up for a product, whether MCP is sufficient, and what a CLI should expose so agents can orchestrate everything.
Notion's stated position is that most knowledge will pass between agents within roughly three years.
This clip from Patrick/Stripe is so good, and also eerily similar to what we’re experiencing inside Notion. So much so that if you replaced the following words: Stripe → Notion transactions → knowledge transact → collaborate you’d basically get our POV! “We’re thinking about: how are all the agents and the Claude Code instances going to use Notion directly themselves, right? Both the Notion product, and just how will they collaborate more broadly? And so we’re thinking a lot about a world where, for most knowledge, agents are the counterparties on both sides. How does an agent sign up for Notion? How does an agent use Notion? Is MCP enough? What should the Notion CLI do? How do we make sure that everything in Notion can be orchestrated and conducted from the CLI, or in some other way that is accessible to agents? How will agents collaborate with each other? What surface will they use? The Notion house view is that most knowledge will be between agents within, call it, three years. It may not be the case that most of the knowledge volume is directly between agents, but I’ll be sort of surprised if there isn’t just a whirling vortex of reasonably small agent-to-agent collaboration.”
This report is categorized under AITOP's "Industry" desk, focusing on US frontier AI labs and Silicon Valley technology leaders. Within our cross-regional analytical framework, it directly maps to AI developer toolchains, coding agents, and engineering workflows. Key entities and technical topics under continuous tracking include Notion, Claude Code, MCP and tools, agents.
Source attribution: curated from Akshay Kothari (@akothari). Cross-source corroboration: 5 independent sources have covered this development (including Lxfater, Aravind Srinivas, 宝玉), confirming industry-wide signal strength.
