Digital ecosystems are business models in which an orchestrator organises a customer journey that consumers and business users access through a digital platform. Most ecosystem analyses focus on a single ecosystem: a landlord lists their property on Airbnb, uses its pricing suggestions and recruits cleaning help through the same platform. 

Yet people rarely live in just one ecosystem. Neither do firms. Airbnb orchestrates its own ecosystem but also relies on app stores, cloud platforms and payment providers, each orchestrating an ecosystem of its own.

The strategy question is thus: How do firms manage their positions across multiple ecosystems? This is especially acute in agentic commerce, where AI agents buy, sell or manage transactions on behalf of users and businesses without anyone completing each step manually: think AI shopping assistants, subscription managers or B2B procurement bots. Morgan Stanley estimates that AI shopping agents could influence US$190–385 billion of e-commerce sales in the United States by 2030, roughly 10–20% of the total. 

Competitive tension

The new agentic commerce architecture has two customer-journey ecosystems:

1. On the buyer’s side (consumer or commercial), agents automate the purchasing journey: searching, comparing, negotiating, buying, tracking shipping, and handling disputes and returns.

2. On the seller’s (or “merchant’s”) side, agents handle the sales journey: presenting the catalogue to buyers’ agents, blocking scrapers, handling checkout, verifying agents, and managing customer insight and loyalty.

The two sides are connected through protocols such as Google’s AP2 and Anthropic’s MCP, and by technical enablers that handle agent attestation, authentication, capability negotiation, and mandate and consent verification. But the ecosystems live in competitive tension. The buyer’s agent wants to compare as many merchant catalogues as possible; the seller’s agent wants to control what is shown, when and to whom, protect its pricing strategy, and stop buyers’ agents from spotting and exploiting the different prices it charges different customers. For example, a retailer may price the same product differently at stores in different locations. An agent can check the price “from” 10 postcodes and choose the cheapest. 

Yet the ecosystems are also interdependent: companies act as complementors or core partners to each other. The ecosystem canvas we’ve developed can show both ecosystems at once, and how they interconnect. It’s a tool for companies to strategise their own ecosystems, whether as an orchestrator or in less central roles. 

To illustrate, the figure below shows Claude’s consumer-side ecosystem (in the left column) and Stripe’s merchant-side ecosystem (in the right column). Stripe is a complementor in Claude’s ecosystem while Claude is a core partner in Stripe’s. The canvas can tell you not only where you stand in your ecosystem today but also suggest the opportunities to leverage your position in another ecosystem elsewhere.

How should Stripe become a core partner in Claude’s ecosystem? In our framework, the core partner is a key stakeholder that the orchestrator can’t replace without significantly damaging the ecosystem’s value proposition. In contrast, complementors or resellers are replaceable because there are other resellers or complementors who own the same resources and can fill the same role. 

If you want to become a core partner, we recommend you follow four strategies:

1. Bring your own ecosystem

Don’t present yourself as a standalone business – you are much more valuable as an ecosystem play. A payments orchestrator that incorporates its entire merchant base into a buyer-side agent ecosystem is more difficult to replace than an offering that provides only a checkout API. 

Stripe’s real asset is the data from millions of merchants. To leverage this, Stripe should aim to become the single integration point through which Claude's agents reach them all. Stripe can provide structured product feeds, together with real-time availability and the ability to checkout with any merchant. When a Claude user asks "buy me a pair of Camper shoes", they should reach much of the commerce world through Stripe. 

Stripe can also offer the same connectivity to developers who build agents on Claude. This would be the equivalent of Google coming to Apple as a provider of generative AI technology, in order to benefit from the search in Safari from Apple’s users who, in turn, enjoy watching Netflix or playing games on their iPhone. 

2. Occupy the bottleneck 

It’s easy to secure modules for checkout and catalogue exposure. It’s far more cumbersome to get software for agent attestation, mandate and consent verification or identity services. Whoever holds the components that resolve trust between the agent, ecosystem and shopper is hard to exclude. This is like owning the toll bridge rather than one of the roads leading to it. 

Stripe could use its fraud, know-your-customer and identity infrastructure to derisk agentic transactions. Before accepting an agent-initiated offer, any merchant will want to know whether this agent is legitimate. Other questions will include which human the agent is acting for, what mandate that human consented to, and who is liable if something goes wrong. If Stripe issues the credentials that carry consent from Claude's user to the merchant, and underwrites the liability if something doesn’t work, then it will own the toll bridge. Such bridges represent the source of competitive advantage in any ecosystem, but many firms ignore them until it’s too late.

3. Acquire for ecosystem synergies

M&As can allow firms to achieve ecosystem synergies. These represent value creation opportunities when the target’s complementors become better integrated with those of the acquirer. An orchestrator in one ecosystem wanting to improve its position in another may acquire targets whose complementors are better integrated with those in the other ecosystem. 

For example, Stripe can buy firms whose complementors are better integrated with Anthropic’s complementors, and then leverage value creation from those integrations in its cross-ecosystem negotiations. In the digital world, you can assess the strength of digital integrations across technologies with publicly available databases, such as BuiltWith.

4. Shape the protocol layer 

Orchestrators can gain structural influence by setting standards, such as AP2, ACP or MCP. You need to become an early partner in a standard that connects agents with each other, by engaging in direct conversations with other orchestrators while they’re still choosing a protocol. This is why firms have been joining standard-setting bodies well before the internet was even invented. 

Engage in ecosystem trading

Use your ecosystem as a currency that you then trade with the owner of another ecosystem. For instance, you can obtain preferred data access, customer visibility or co-development opportunities (including standard-setting) in their ecosystems, then trade that for access to your own data, control of a bottleneck or technical expertise. Alternatively, you can give them access to your new complementors that are already integrated with theirs. A competing firm that isn’t an orchestrator in their own ecosystem can’t obtain these advantages.