What Link data tells us about AI spending

We surveyed 394 customers who use Link, a digital wallet built by Stripe, on their AI habits. Eighty percent had used a chat-based agent in the past month, and half had used AI for shopping research at least monthly.
Has that usage translated into spending? To find out, we analyzed spending patterns across the 250 million customers paying with Link. We found that Link customers are spending more on AI than they were three months prior, investing heavily in platforms that let them build with AI.
Here’s what the data shows.
Link customers are spending more on AI products each month
We grouped Link customers by their monthly spend on AI products. The top 10% of Link customers with the highest spend on AI products increased their monthly spending from $183 in December 2025 to $359 in March 2026—nearly doubling in a single quarter.
What’s notable is the timing: it took 22 months for that same cohort to grow from $84 to $183, but only three months to double from $183 to $359. Even at the 50th percentile, monthly spending on AI products increased from $60 to $72 over the same period.
Link customers are spending more on AI app-builder platforms
When we isolate spending on app-builder platforms like Replit, Lovable, and Bolt, the growth is even more pronounced. The top 10% of Link customers with the highest spend on AI products are now spending 5x more on app-builder platforms each month compared to January 2025.
Building the infrastructure to support agents
Link customers are spending more on AI and using agents for shopping research. As these agents become more capable, they’ll increasingly need the ability to transact with businesses and one another.
That’s why we built Link’s wallet for agents. It lets customers authorize agents to pay on their behalf with spending controls they set, gives agents broad purchasing access across any seller on Stripe, and gives businesses verified transactions without complex integrations.
Learn more about how you can give agents the ability to pay with Link’s wallet for agents.

Facts Only

* 394 customers use Link, a digital wallet built by Stripe.
* Eighty percent of customers used a chat-based agent in the past month.
* Half of customers used AI for shopping research at least monthly.
* Link customers are spending more on AI than three months prior.
* The top 10% of Link customers with the highest spend on AI products increased monthly spending from $183 (December 2025) to $359 (March 2026).
* Monthly spending for the 50th percentile group increased from $60 to $72 over the same period.
* The top 10% of Link customers are now spending 5x more on app-builder platforms like Replit, Lovable, and Bolt monthly compared to January 2025.
* Link provides a wallet for agents to authorize payments with spending controls across Stripe sellers.

Executive Summary

Link customers are spending more on AI products than they did three months prior. The top 10% of Link customers who spend the most on AI products increased their monthly spending from $183 in December 2025 to $359 in March 2026, nearly doubling in that quarter. For the broader group, monthly spending on AI products increased from $60 to $72 over the same period. Spending has also shifted towards app-builder platforms like Replit, Lovable, and Bolt, with the top 10% of Link customers spending five times more on these platforms monthly compared to January 2025. The data suggests that Link customers are investing heavily in building AI infrastructure and utilizing AI agents for tasks like shopping research.

Full Take

The data reveals a phase transition where AI usage among Link customers is directly translating into increased financial investment, particularly in infrastructure and development tools. The acceleration in spending—doubling within three months for the top spenders—suggests that access to generative AI has moved from experimentation to commitment. Furthermore, the focus shifting to app-builder platforms indicates a pattern where users are not just consuming AI but actively seeking the means to build with it, pointing toward a deepening dependency on platform ecosystems. The development of Link's wallet specifically to facilitate agent payments suggests an emergent need for automated transactional capabilities within these AI workflows. This implies that the value proposition shifts from simple consumption of AI tools to controlling the financial execution of autonomous AI agents. The broader implication is a potential structural shift where payment rails become integrated into the operational layer of AI activity, raising questions about the control, transparency, and agency of those deploying these sophisticated systems. What mechanisms are being built to ensure that spending growth aligns with user autonomy rather than simply incentivizing platform engagement?

Sentinel — Human

Confidence

The text presents specific quantitative findings regarding user spending habits on AI, lending it a factual structure, but the interpretive leap about future agent needs is characteristic of product-focused journalism.

Signals Detected

Moderate sentence length variance; flows like a report but has distinct emphasis points.

Logically progresses from usage statistics to spending patterns to product development rationale without sounding overly hedged or passionless.

Clear, direct presentation of data points (e.g., $183 to $359) suggesting source material was adhered to, though context requires external verification for full corroboration.

Specific temporal data (Dec 2025 to March 2026) suggests specific sourcing, but the context is highly abstracted; potential LLM synthesis risk exists in phrasing.

Human Indicators

The transition between descriptive statistics and speculative future needs ('That’s why we built Link’s wallet...') suggests a human framing of data into a strategic conclusion rather than pure statistical recitation.